2-126 - Informal Teaching and Socialization across Cultures – Key Processes and Developmental Outcomes

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

This symposium brings together an international group of scholars that focus on the influence of culture on key developmental phenomena, namely prosocial behavior, cultural learning, and the acquisition of verbal display rule knowledge. The first presentation focuses on the way in which caregivers from two cultures (i.e., urban Germany and rural Ecuador) structure toddlers’ prosocial contributions around mealtime. The authors describe patterns of structuring that help explain why children from indigenous communities more often routinely contribute in household chores. The second presentation focuses on the different ways in which conventions and skills are transmitted to 2-year-olds from five different cultures. Differences in teaching – reaching from direct active teaching to subtle mechanisms such as opportunity provisioning – are linked to the families’ lifeworlds. The third presentation similarly focuses on teaching and links observed cultural differences to ethnotheories on how task engagement is either organized independently, as is the case for the US-American dyads, or collaboratively, as in the Ni-Vanuatu community. Focusing on the emergence of culture-specific norms of mental state expression, the fourth presentation shows that, with increasing age, Japanese participants avoid expressing conflicting opinions for the sake of maintaining harmony while US American participants increasingly do so in favor of emotional authenticity. Depending on their cultural model, caregivers’ expectations and intuitions concerning children’s developing experience and behavior vary largely, with important consequences for the way in which caregivers’ structure everyday routines with their children. As the four talks of this symposium show and argue, this has important consequences for child development.

Sub Unit

• Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Chairs

• Joscha Kärtner, University of Münster

• Joan Miller, Department of Psychology, The New School for Social Research

Individual Presentations

• The socialization of children’s contributions at home: A comparison between indigenous-Ecuadorian and German children - Presenting Author: Marta Giner Torréns, University of Münster; Non-Presenting Author: Andrew Dee Coppens, University of New Hampshire; Non-Presenting Author: Joscha Kärtner, University of Münster

• Cultural Learning at the Kitchen Table - Presenting Author: Moritz Köster, Free University Berlin; Non-Presenting Author: Joscha Kärtner, University of Münster; Non-Presenting Author: Marta Giner Torréns, University of Münster; Non-Presenting Author: Lilia Cavalcante, Universidade Federal do Pará; Non-Presenting Author: Shoji Itakura, Kyoto University; Non-Presenting Author: Patricia Kanngiesser, Freie Universität Berlin

• Modeling collaboration versus independence: Cultural variation in caregiver teaching beliefs and behavior - Presenting Author: Jennifer M. Clegg, Texas State University; Non-Presenting Author: Nicole J. Wen, The University of Texas at Austin; Non-Presenting Author: Paige E. Hartman, Auburn University; Non-Presenting Author: Adam Alcott, The University of Texas at Austin; Non-Presenting Author: Elena Keltner, The University of Texas at Dallas; Non-Presenting Author: Cristine H Legare, University of Texas at Austin

• Verbal display rule knowledge: A cross-cultural developmental perspective - Presenting Author: Matthew Wice, Department of Psychology, State University of New York at New Paltz; Non-Presenting Author: Tomoko Matsui, Tokyo Gakugei University; Non-Presenting Author: Gen Tsudaka, Department of Psychology, The New School for Social Research; Non-Presenting Author: Minoru Karasawa, Department of Psychology, Nagoya University; Non-Presenting Author: Joan Miller, Department of Psychology, The New School for Social Research