Poster #193 - The Effect of Instrumental versus Conventional Language on Children’s Imitation and Teaching of Inefficient Actions

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Imitation has been shown to be an important mechanism for the encoding and transmission of cultural information (Flynn & Whiten, 2008; Hopper et al., 2010; Whiten & Flynn, 2010). Recent work has focused on how imitation fidelity is influenced by model-specific factors, such as the social group membership of the model (Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010) as well as situational factors, such as the presence or absence of the model (DiYanni et al., 2011; Nielsen & Blank, 2011), the number of models (Corriveau et al., 2017; DiYanni et al., 2015; Haun et al., 2012; Hermann et al., 2013; McGuigan & Robertson, 2015), and the language used to describe the goal of a task (Clegg & Legare, 2016). The current work explored one such situational factor: we asked how conventional versus instrumental language would influence the imitation and transmission of inefficient actions. We focus on inefficient actions because previous work examining the impact of linguistic cues has primarily focused on children’s imitation of tasks with non-consequential end goals. It is important to also consider how far children will go for the sake of conforming with a modeled behavior, even if it means sacrificing goal completion.
Fifty 4- through 6-year-olds participated. Half watched a video in which a model used instrumental language (i.e., “I am going to crush a cookie”) and half heard a model use conventional language (i.e., “We always do it this way”). Next, the model chose an inefficient tool over an efficient alternative to complete a task. The child was then given the choice between the two tools to perform the task. To explore cultural transmission, a second experimenter invited the child to demonstrate the task to a puppet. Children also answered 26 items of a social desirability questionnaire (Crandall et al., 1965), and parents completed four questions from the Parent Authoritarianism Questionnaire (Feldman & Stenner, 1997).
Figure 1 shows that the percentage of children who imitated the model’s (inefficient) tool choice was significantly higher in the Conventional condition (80.8%) than in the Instrumental condition (50%), Fisher Exact test, p = 0.036. Similarly, children taught the puppet to use the inefficient tool significantly more often in the Conventional condition (73.1% v. 41.7%), Fisher Exact Test, p = 0.04. There was no relation between children’s tool choices and their social desirability scores or parental ratings related to authoritarianism. These results are consistent with those of previous research (Clegg & Legare, 2016; Corriveau et al., 2017; Legare et al., 2015) and demonstrate that conventional language impacts even the imitation of inefficient actions. In addition, they demonstrate that the impact of conventional language supersedes that of a child’s desire to please others and his parents’ ratings of authoritarianism. The results have strong implications for the extent to which children will attempt to conform with what “we” are “supposed” to do.

Authors

• Cara DiYanni, Rider University
  Presenting Author

• Jennifer M. Clegg, Texas State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kathleen Helen Corriveau, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author