Children’s Understanding of Rule Creation and its Relation to Daily Social Behaviors

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that children acquire normative knowledge and develop normative behaviors in early childhood, however little is known about children's views on how rules should be created. In this study, we combined behavioral experiment methods and observation methods to explore children’s views on how rules should be created and how these views may relate to children's daily social behaviors. We focused on children’s consideration of collective agreement and individual authority in reasoning about rule creation.

We showed 98 4- to 9-year-olds (Mage = 6.85) and 108 adults (as baseline) a group of story characters who wanted to play a game together and needed to decide a rule for the game. We then presented children with six different ways to decide the rule of the game, that is 1) by collective agreement, 2) by the most popular child, 3) by the child who had played the game before and knows how to play the game, 4) by the teacher’s helper of the day, 5) by the strongest child, or 6) by a child from another class. The presentation order was counterbalanced across participants. For each way to decide the rule, participants were asked whether it is okay to decide the rule that way on a 0-3 rating scale (0 indicating not very okay, 3 indicating very okay).

Figure 1 shows children’s responses split by age group. Across all age groups, children think that it is okay to decide the rule by collective agreement significantly above chance (p < .001), and not okay for the child from another class to decide the rule (p < .001). However, children increasingly think that it is not okay for the child who had played before, the teacher’s helper, or the strongest child to decide the rule (ps < .026). By the age of 8 to 9, children’s answers looked very similar to those of adults: The majority of the 8- to 9-year-olds think that it is most okay for everyone to decide the rule together, followed by the child who had played the game before or the most popular child. They think it is not okay for any other individual child to decide the rule.

We also video-recorded the free-play activities of the preschoolers aged 4-6 (N = 38) in classrooms and systematically coded their social interactive behaviors (i.e., the frequency of interaction with others, the total number of individuals one interacted with). We found that preschoolers’ responses to the questions in the rule creation task were significantly correlated to their social interactive behaviors in daily classrooms. Specifically, children who interacted more with others in daily classrooms were more likely to answer that it is okay only to decide the rule by collective agreement, but not by any individual child (p = .018).

In summary, between age 4 and 9, children increasingly value collective agreement (rather than individual authority) in rule creation. Interacting and negotiating with others in the daily classroom may improve children's understanding of rule creation.

Authors

• Xin Alice Zhao, East China Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Xiangdong Yang, East China Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author