1-035 - Friends and enemies: Children’s developing understanding of how relationships inform behavior, inferences and expectations.

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Humans engage in complex social relationships and use relationships to guide their own behavior and predict and interpret others’ behavior. Understanding social relationships exerts a deep impact on people’s daily lives, both in how they interact with and learn from others. In four papers, this symposium explores the development of children’s intuitions about how social ties influence interactions.

Paper 1 investigates how infants and toddlers think others should retaliate against a transgressor based on group allegiances; they expect others to retaliate less toward an ingroup member than an outgroup member. Paper 2 explores how children’s personal allegiances guide their own sharing. It finds that children make very precise and consistent calculations about how much to share with others based on whether they are a stranger, friend, or enemy. Paper 3 explores how children in the US and China balance personal allegiances with notions of fairness, finding that children increasingly understand that friends expect us to take their side, but also increasingly believe that one should be impartial in such situations. Finally, Paper 4 explores children’s intuitions about how personal allegiances impact a source’s trustworthiness, and finds that children discount negative information about a source’s enemy, because people are biased to say negative things about their enemies.

These studies track the development of children’s reasoning about affable and antagonistic social relationships from age 15 months through 12 years old. They demonstrate both the impressive early competencies children have for reasoning about these relationships as well as the development of this understanding.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Alex Shaw, University of Chicago

Individual Presentations

• Group Membership Modulates Early Expectations about Retaliatory Harm - Presenting Author: Fransisca Ting, UIUC; Non-Presenting Author: Zijing He, Sun Yat-sen University; Non-Presenting Author: Renee Baillargeon, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Welfare tradeoff psychology is active in childhood - Presenting Author: Rhea Howard, Harvard; Non-Presenting Author: Samuel Mehr, Harvard; Non-Presenting Author: Max Krasnow, Harvard

• Friend or Fair: The development of loyalty and impartiality in the US and China - Presenting Author: Alex Shaw, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Yinyuan Zheng, Northwestern University; Non-Presenting Author: Anam Barakzai, University of Chicago

• Children discount negative information about enemies - Presenting Author: Zoe Liberman, University of California Santa Barbara; Non-Presenting Author: Alex Shaw, University of Chicago