Examining development in children’s social inferences

• In Event: Advances in Social Cognition: Children’s Inferences in a Complex Social World

Abstract

During the preschool years, children become quite practiced in using social and numerical information to navigate the world around them. Indeed, young children readily rely on base-rates (i.e., prior probabilities) to make decisions and predict events, while they concurrently become adept at using traits and preferences to predict and explain others’ behaviours. Although much work has examined these abilities separately, less is known about their ability to weigh this information together. Extensive work has shown that adults often underuse base-rate information when it conflicts with personality descriptions (i.e., the representativeness heuristic: Kahneman & Tversky, 1973). However, it is unclear if, and when, this preference for case-specific personality information develops. We presented 4- to 6-year-old children with child-friendly variants of the lawyer-engineer problem. Children were given a base-rate of characters along with a personality description (i.e., individuating information) of a randomly selected individual from that population and were tasked with classifying the individual. Across two experiments, we varied features of the base-rate and individuating information to explore development in children’s ability to use this information in tandem. In Experiment 1 (N = 96), we presented children with group information highly familiar to their age group (i.e., nice vs. mean traits; gender-stereotypical boy vs. girl toys) that aligned or conflicted with an 8:2 base-rate. Notably, we found age differences in children’s performance when the information conflicted. That is, 4-year-olds trended more toward base-rates in their responses, but by age 6, children overwhelmingly responded using the individuating information (Figure 1). Although these findings highlight an important age difference in children’s use of information, it is unclear if children are reflexively relying on their preferred piece of information or are considering all available information in the problem. Thus, we further explored this age difference in Experiment 2 (N = 160) by varying features of the base-rate and individuating information. More specifically, children were presented with group information that is less ingrained in Western cultures, and the strength of the description was varied across conditions. We varied the base-rate information by presenting children with a skewed or equal base-rate. Together, these manipulations allowed us to explore reflexive use of individuating information in 6-year-olds, and, conversely, reflexive base-rate use in 4-year-olds. Here, 4-year-old children continued to rely on the skewed base-rates, regardless of the strength of the individuating information. This preference for base-rates was quite strong, as 4-year-olds did not rely on the individuating information at above chance levels when the base-rates were equal and uninformative, suggesting they overweigh base-rates in this task. Six-year-olds more flexibly used the information provided and relied on the individuating information when it was heavy-handed, though relied on the base-rate when the individuating information was less descriptive (Figure 2). Thus, although 4- and 6-year-olds demonstrate contrasting preferences for social and numerical information, 6-year-olds consider other information in the problem while 4-year-olds reflexively rely on base-rates. Together, these findings highlight development in children’s social learning, along with advances in their ability to weigh information in tandem.

Authors

• Samantha Gualtieri, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Stephanie Denison, University of Waterloo
  Non-Presenting Author