Do children interpret costs as signals of commitment to a group?

• In Event: Children's Understanding of Group Dynamics: Group Norms and Group Membership

Abstract

Cultivating a reputation as a reliable cooperator is crucial for living within groups, and so people are motivated to engage in costly actions to signal they are highly committed groupmates (Gintis et al., 2001). Indeed, these costly signals of commitment are highly effective. Adults, for instance, are more trusting of both religious ingroup and outgroup members who engage in costly signaling (e.g., obeying strict religious dietary rules; Hall et al., 2015). Here, we explored a novel group context and investigated whether young children also expect costly signalers to be more committed, trustworthy groupmates. A recently proposed framework, the “naïve utility calculus,” posits that young children assume agents seek to maximize benefits and minimize costs, and that they use this basic premise to make inferences about agents (Jara-Ettinger et al., 2016). Basically, if a person engages in a costly action in pursuit of a goal, then children and adults alike will infer that the person must ascribe great utility to the goal. We extended this framework to the group context, hypothesizing that if children make this calculation when evaluating group members, they should construe costly actions on behalf of the group as evidence of a person’s commitment to said group.

Across two experiments (Experiment 1: N=171; Experiment 2: N=301), we tested whether children not only view costly actions as signals of a person’s commitment, but also whether this would affect their evaluations of that person. In both studies, we introduced younger children (4- and 5-year-olds), older children (9- and 10-year-olds), and adults to a novel social group and two people joining that group. One person (the costly actor) pays a greater relative cost to join the social group than the other (the control). In Experiment 2, we compared this “group” scenario to an “individual” scenario, where the costly actor pays higher cost than the control on behalf of an individual instead of a group. We then asked participants both first-person (e.g., “Who do you like more?”) and third-person (e.g., “Who will this groupmate like more?”) questions in a forced-choice manner.

In both experiments, adults and older children reported that, compared to the control, the costly actor wanted to be in the group more (“Direct” question, see Figures 1 and 2), expected a fellow group member to favor the costly actor, and also favored the costly actor themselves. Younger participants did not make these same evaluations in Experiment 1, but did in Experiment 2 when we employed a different manipulation of cost. Participants also expected the costly signaler wanted to please the individual more than the control did in Experiment 2’s “individual” scenario, but their preference and expectations of others’ preference for the costly actor was weaker in the “individual” than in the “group” scenario.

Allying oneself with committed groupmates is crucial for survival, and humans rely on costly signals as markers of commitment. By extending the naïve utility calculus to a group context, we present it as a potential proximate mechanism through which we fulfill this need.

Authors

• Emily Rachel Gonsier Gerdin, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Yarrow C Dunham, Yale University