Children’s Early Understanding of Group Coordination in Social and Epistemic Conflicts.

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Groups are an integral aspect of human life and social functioning, and groups’ decision making strategies are remarkably complex and flexible, often requiring a balancing of individual and collective beliefs, desires, and actions. Unsurprisingly, developmental psychologists have long been interested in children’s emerging understanding of fairness, norms, and coordination, and this symposium highlights the developmental origins of different governance schemes in social and epistemic conflicts. Paper 1 shows that when dividing resources with a socially dominant individual, children leverage fair outcomes for themselves while also adeptly navigating dominance hierarchies. Paper 2 discusses how children make sophisticated distinctions between the “tyranny of the majority” and fairness in collective decision-making. Paper 3 illustrates that children reason flexibly about the relation between numerical group size and hierarchy: although children ascribe greater power to numerically larger groups across development, the association between status and numerically smaller groups increases with age. Paper 4 discusses how children manage the tradeoffs of two ways of managing epistemic conflicts in groups: when deliberative reasoning can conclusively answer a question (e.g., Sudoku puzzles), children expect greater accuracy from small group discussion than from individual polling of a larger crowd, but when it cannot (e.g., population preference), they prefer polling. Each of these papers explore new territory in social cognitive development, demonstrating children’s flexible reasoning about coordinating group consensus. Together, the talks outline the development of children’s sophisticated ability to manage collective cognition, a crucial aspect of adult life.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Emory Richardson, Yale University

• Hannah Hok, University of Chicago

Individual Presentations

• How Fairness and Dominance Guide Young Children’s Decisions in a Bargaining Game - Presenting Author: Sebastian Grueneisen, Max-Planck-Institut für Evolutionäre Anthropologie; Non-Presenting Author: Michael Tomasello, Duke University

• Children’s Early Conception of Voting and Majority Rules - Presenting Author: Hannah Hok, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Alex Shaw, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Emily Rachel Gonsier Gerdin, Yale University

• Small Groups Lead, Big Groups Control: Perceptions of Numerical Group Size, Power, and Status Across Development - Presenting Author: Isobel A Heck, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Jesús Bas, Université Paris Descartes; Non-Presenting Author: Katherine D. Kinzler, University of Chicago

• Developing Intuitions about the Tradeoffs of Information Sharing in Collaborative Learning - Presenting Author: Emory Richardson, Yale University; Non-Presenting Author: Frank C Keil, Yale University