Balancing Belonging, Fairness, and Cost in Children's Preferences and Predictions About Affiliative Behaviours

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

As children develop, they acquire intuitions about fairness and prosociality (Sommerville, Schmidt, Yun, & Burns, 2013) and the cost/benefit calculations underlying others’ decision-making (Jara-Ettinger, Gweon, Schulz, & Tenenbaum, 2016) in their social interactions. However, children also show an early preference towards members of groups that they belong to and expect others to behave according to the same principles, which can potentially conflict with these developing beliefs about the fair treatment of others. Understanding how and when the emergence of this awareness affects children’s preferences and predictions, especially when they must balance multiple sources of motivation, can provide greater insight for developing strategies to address bias and promote equitable treatment during a period of developmental malleability.

Presentation 1 examines the emergence of young children’s detection of social exclusion, and differentiates awareness of exclusionary behaviour from preferences for inclusive actors. Presentation 2 compares the effects of minimal group assignment on children’s and adults’ moral judgments and affiliative choices after observing third-party exclusion. Presentation 3 investigates children’s expectations about the inclusiveness of social groups in interracial and interwealth contexts. Presentation 4 examines predictions about affiliative intent based on the costliness of an actor’s behaviour.

Together, the proposed presentations find that children readily recognize social exclusion and use their understanding of fairness and cost in predicting others’ affiliative behaviour. However, information about social groups as well as belonging to a social group may lead children to make or expect trade-offs in norms about fairness.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Rebekah Gelpí, University of Toronto

Individual Presentations

• Children’s Awareness of Social Exclusion Does not Align With Their Social Preferences - Presenting Author: Hyesung Grace Hwang, University of California - Santa Cruz; Non-Presenting Author: Lori Markson, Washington University in St. Louis

• Dissociating Children's Moral Evaluations and Affiliative Decision-Making in Intergroup Exclusion - Presenting Author: Rebekah Gelpí, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Wei Ai, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Arnav Verma, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: William A. Cunningham, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Jessica A Sommerville, University of Toronto

• Children’s Predictions and Preferences: Giving Priority to Race or Wealth - Presenting Author: Amanda Rose Burkholder, Furman University; Non-Presenting Author: Melanie A. Killen, University of Maryland - College Park

• Do Children Interpret Costs as Signals of Commitment to a Group? - Presenting Author: Emily Rachel Gonsier Gerdin, Yale University; Non-Presenting Author: Yarrow C Dunham, Yale University