How Children Learn about the Social World from Others' Messages

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Decades of research has documented how children construct concepts of the social world--e.g., understandings of social groups, concepts of normative behavior—through their first-hand interactions with others. Recent developmental research has also begun to identify how social concepts can be constructed based on others' claims (e.g., Gonzalez et al., 2017; Lane et al., 2020; Rottman et al., 2017; Segall et al., 2015); this is the focus of our symposium. Across three experimental studies, conducted in three independent labs, children were exposed to socially-relevant claims in a variety of ways—by overhearing conversations, reading books, or being directly spoken to. The first speaker will present work demonstrating that merely overhearing a video call in which the caller provides brief, negative claims about novel social groups negatively influenced U.S. 3- to 9-year-olds' attitudes towards those groups; the effects persisted two weeks after overhearing the call. The second speaker will describe a study in which U.S. 6- to 8-year-olds' attitudes about fairness (equality-based vs. merit-based) shifted after they were either read a storybook or directly told about a schoolteacher who divided prizes either equally or meritoriously among her students; these effects also lasted for weeks. The third speaker will describe work in which Chinese and U.S. 3- to 5-year-olds revised their initial judgments that novel actions (which caused others distress) were bad, after they heard people claim that those actions were permissible. A leading developmental scholar will integrate these findings and discuss them in the context of children's social-learning and social-cognitive development.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Jonathan D. Lane, Vanderbilt University

Discussant

• Gail D Heyman, University of California - San Diego

Individual Presentations

• Overhearing Brief Negative Messages about Social Groups has Lasting Influences on Children’s Intergroup Attitudes - Presenting Author: Emily Conder, Vanderbilt University; Non-Presenting Author: Jonathan D. Lane, Vanderbilt University

• How do Storybooks and Testimony Impact Children’s Fairness Principles? - Presenting Author: Joshua Rottman, Franklin & Marshall College; Non-Presenting Author: Valerie Zizik, Franklin & Marshall College; Non-Presenting Author: Kelly Minard, Franklin & Marshall College; Non-Presenting Author: Liane Young, Boston College; Non-Presenting Author: Peter R. Blake, Boston University; Non-Presenting Author: Deb Kelemen, Boston University

• The Role of Adult Testimony in Children's Moral Decision Making - Presenting Author: Pearl Han Li, Duke Univeristy; Non-Presenting Author: Melissa A. Koenig, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities; Non-Presenting Author: Paul Harris, Harvard University