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

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Children are tasked with learning about other people in a complex social world. For example, when children draw social inferences, they must integrate individual- and group-level information, and consider causal explanations for the behaviors they observed so far. This symposium features four papers that each advance theoretical understanding of how children solve these problems.

Paper 1 examines how children weigh base rate versus individuating information, and whether this reasoning changes over development. Paper 2 investigates children’s acknowledgment of constraints on others’ actions, and if priming children with alternative choice structures improves this capacity. Paper 3 demonstrates that providing children with different explanations for behavior, specifically, structural explanations versus merely externalist explanations, has distinct effects on their inferences about social categories. Paper 4 identifies children’s capacity to reason about proportions as an important predictor of how they evaluate others’ sharing behavior. Together, these papers offer novel insight into the social-cognitive mechanisms that shape how children navigate a complicated social world.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Jamie Amemiya, University of California - San Diego

Individual Presentations

• Examining development in children’s social inferences - Presenting Author: Samantha Gualtieri, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Stephanie Denison, University of Waterloo

• The Role of Alternatives in Children’s Reasoning about Constrained Choices - Presenting Author: Jamie Amemiya, University of California - San Diego; Non-Presenting Author: Gail D Heyman, University of California - San Diego; Non-Presenting Author: Caren M. Walker, University of California - San Diego

• Beyond situational explanations: Structural thinking as a unique type of externalist thinking - Presenting Author: Nadya Vasilyeva, Princeton University; Non-Presenting Author: Alison Gopnik, University of California - Berkeley; Non-Presenting Author: Tania Lombrozo, Princeton University

• Proportional Reasoning Predicts Reasoning about Disadvantage in Preschool-Aged Children - Presenting Author: Nadia Chernyak, University of California - Irvine; Non-Presenting Author: Rui Zhang, University of California, Irvine; Non-Presenting Author: Michelle A Hurst, University of Chicago