2-182 - Social influences on reasoning from evidence

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Inductive inference is a key component of human cognition, guiding explanation, prediction, and planning. Young children have sophisticated capacities to keep track of and make reasoned inferences from evidence, but research has often overlooked the ways in which these capacities are influenced by different social contexts. This symposium builds on recent theoretical perspectives emphasizing the importance of social and cultural influences on cognitive development (e.g., Chudek & Heinrich, 2011; Schulz, 2012; Shafto, Godman, & Frank, 2012), bringing together research investigating social influences on children’s reasoning from evidence from a variety of theoretical and empirical perspectives. Paper 1 shows that preschoolers’ reasoning about counterevidence that conflicts with a recently-inferred causal pattern varies drastically depending on whether that counterevidence is explicitly demonstrated for the child’s pedagogical benefit. Paper 2 adds a peer-interaction perspective, showing that children’s ability to use evidence to infer others’ preferences is influenced by engaging with that evidence with a peer, and that dyads engaging in higher-level discussion more readily solve the task. Paper 3 brings a parent-child interaction perspective, showing that parents’ epistemic stances and types of explanation influence children’s learning in a causal exploration task. Finally, Paper 4 focuses on cultural differences in the use of social information, finding that Chinese-American preschoolers are more likely than Caucasian-American preschoolers to privilege information from a consensus rather than conflicting perceptual evidence. Taken together, these papers show diverse social influences on children’s reasoning from evidence, and suggest how children’s reasoning is embedded in and fundamentally shaped by different social contexts.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Lucas P Butler, University of Maryland

• Kathleen Helen Corriveau, Boston University

Individual Presentations

• Pedagogical demonstration facilitates children’s use of counterevidence - Presenting Author: Lucas P Butler, University of Maryland; Erica L Zippert, Vanderbilt University

• Peer discussion and the development of deductive reasoning abilities in childhood - Presenting Author: Justin Busch, University of Texas at Austin; Emily A Eck, University of Texas at Austin; Hugo Mercier, Universite de Neuchatel; Cristine H Legare, University of Texas at Austin

• The role of parental epistemological beliefs in children’s reasoning from evidence - Presenting Author: Katelyn E Kurkul, Merrimack College; Eleanor Castine, Boston University; Kathleen Helen Corriveau, Boston University

• Cultural differences in the imitation and transmission of inefficient actions - Presenting Author: Cara DiYanni, Rider University; Kathleen Helen Corriveau, Boston University