Why can’t I buy chocolate in the shop with my Monopoly money? - Understanding contextual boundaries in pretense play

• In Event: Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

It has been proposed recently that participating in pretense play could be the developmental cradle through which children come to understand how status functions and institutional facts are created in human societies (Searle, 1995; Rakoczy, 2008). The way object functions are stipulated during pretend play–that a certain object counts as another object within the context of a game–is structurally quite similar to how functions are assigned to certain objects in human societies (for example, that this piece of paper counts as money in our country). Therefore, studying the reasoning of children during pretend play could be useful in order to understand their reasoning in wider social contexts. In our study, the main question was whether 3 year old children understand that object functions stipulated during pretense could only be known by people witnessing this stipulation. During the experiments, children played together with an experimenter and well-known objects. Two play episodes were connected to each object: the first corresponded to the well-known function of the object, while the second was made up on the scene. There was a specific prop connected to each game. This happened in either the presence or the absence of a second experimenter. Following the play episodes, the second experimenter had also decided to play with the object, and asked for a “missing” prop. We measured how children interpret this by recording which prop they decided to give upon the request. Our prediction was that in case the experimenter was present during the play episodes, children would be more likely to select the prop corresponding to the pretense stipulation, compared to when she was absent. The results show this pattern: in case the person making the request was a witness to the play episodes, 56% of the participants chose the object connected to the made up pretense situation, while only 31% of the children did so in her absence. We have conducted a Generalized Linear Mixed Model analysis to explore the possible effect of condition, object position, condition order and object type, as well as the interactions of these effects, on object choice as the target variable. Only the effect of condition was significant (F = 6.414, p = 0.013). Therefore, it seems that preschool aged children do take the knowledge state of a person into consideration while interpreting their behaviour in pretend play. As children live in an increasingly multicultural world and have first-hand experience that different norms might apply in different contexts or cultures, being able to correctly track who might or might not be familiar with a given norm could be crucial to successfully navigate in their complex social environment.

Authors

• Krisztina Andrási, Eötvös Loránd University
  Presenting Author

• Réka Schvajda, ELTE Pedagógiai és Pszichológiai Kar
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ildiko Kiraly, ELTE Eotvos Lorand University Budapest
  Non-Presenting Author