Poster #195 - The Relationship Between Parental Authoritarian Values and Preschoolers’ Perception of Cues of Credibility

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Preschoolers can detect indicators of trustworthiness and competence in people who give them new information. Examples of credibility indicators include verbal and nonverbal cues of an informant’s level of confidence, as well as the informant’s past accuracy (e.g. Harris & Corriveau, 2014). Past research has examined the relationship between parental values and children’s preference to learn from a more accurate informant (Tagar et al., 2014). Our research examines the relation between parental authoritarian values and children’s use of confidence cues. Such research might inform us on the influence of values on the early development of selective trust.

We hypothesized that the more authoritarian their parents, 1) the more frequently children would favour learning from a confident informant rather than a hesitant informant; 2) the more frequently children would favor learning from informants who first appear confident and later hesitant, rather than informants who first appear hesitant and later confident; and 3) the more frequently children would trust informants who are hesitant and accurate, instead of informants who are confident and inaccurate. Four- and five-year-olds (N= 71; range 46-73 months, M=59 months; 35 males) had to choose between two novel labels presented by a confident informant and a hesitant informant. In condition 1, one informant displayed consistent confidence cues and the other consistent hesitancy cues throughout the whole study. In condition 2, the informant who had previously been confident was hesitant when labelling the novel objects, and vice versa for the informant who had previously been hesitant. In condition 3, one informant was confident but inaccurate while the other informant was hesitant but accurate in the history phase, and both remained consistently confident or hesitant when labelling novel objects at test. Parents completed a two-measure parental authoritarian values questionnaire, adapted from (Stenner, 1997)

Correlations were computed for each condition to evaluate the relationship between parental authoritarian values and the likelihood that children would choose the same novel label as the (currently) confident informant. In condition 1, measure 1 of authoritarianism did not significantly correlate with selective learning (N = 29; r= .047, p = .809), while measure 2 resulted in a significant moderate correlation, but in the opposite direction as hypothesized (N = 29; r= -.378, p = .043). In conditions 2 and 3, none of the correlations were significant (condition 2, measure 1: N = 13; r= .281, p = .352; condition 2, measure 2: N = 13; r= .064; p = .834; condition 3, measure 1: N = 29; r= .159, p = .409; condition 3, measure 2: N =29; r= -.242, p = .205). Thus, results are inconsistent with hypotheses, and suggest that parental authoritarian value may at best have a weak to moderate relationship with children’s likelihood of choosing to learn novel information from a hesitant informant. Hence, although children of authoritarian parents have been shown to be more attentive to accuracy than other children in past research, our results suggest that they are not simply more attentive to all cues of credibility.

Authors

• Sara-Emilie McIntee, University of Ottawa
  Presenting Author

• Patricia Brosseau-Liard, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author