Investigating Children’s Social Curiosity of the Self

• In Event: The Development of Social Curiosity in Children

Abstract

We care deeply about how others think of us – we talk about it, think about it, and sometimes, even seek out such information. Recent work has suggested that these thoughts and behaviors emerge quite early: even preschool-aged children reason about and manage others’ beliefs of the self, and at around five years of age children’s reputational concerns influence their prosociality and learning (Asaba & Gweon, 2022; Engelmann & Rapp, 2018; Silver & Shaw, 2018). However, this work leaves open questions about children’s drive to learn about these beliefs: just how strong is children’s desire to seek self-relevant information from others, and how can we measure this curiosity?

A majority of the literature on children’s information-seeking and curiosity has focused on how children explore the physical world (e.g., objects: Stahl & Feigenson, 2015; causal systems: Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007), primarily using object manipulation as a way to measure curiosity. Here we synthesize this tradition with a well-known paradigm for measuring motivation — the Marshmallow task (e.g., Mischel, 1974; Kidd et al., 2013) — to better understand how children’s curiosity extends to the social world, and in particular, what others think about the self.

In the current study (n = 40, ages 3-5), participants were assigned to either the Self condition or Jordan condition. Children were invited to draw a picture of anything they wanted; afterwards they were told that another child (“Jordan”) had also made a drawing, and that their drawings would be placed inside two separate folders. The experimenter told the child that they would evaluate both drawings and place a sticker inside the folder if the drawing was “really good”, but not if it was “just okay”. After evaluating the drawings out of sight of the child, the experimenter exited the room but left behind one of the folders on the table in front of the child. The key condition difference is which folder the child was left with: either their own folder (Self condition), or Jordan’s folder (Jordan condition). Children were subsequently left alone in the room for three minutes (Figure 1a).

The key dependent measure was whether children peeked inside of the folder to see if there was a sticker, suggesting that they sought out knowledge of how the experimenter evaluated the drawing. We found that children were more likely to peek inside the folder in the Self condition (65%, 13/20) than in the Jordan condition (20%, 4/20, p = .01, Fisher’s Exact Test; Figure 1b). We are currently planning a pre-registered replication of this study.

These results suggest that even early in life, children are curious about others’ beliefs of the self and want to know how others think of them. In our study, children were more willing to exert effort and potentially violate a social norm (i.e., sneakily peeking when the experimenter is away) to retrieve information about a drawing’s evaluation only when it was their own. Our work begins to expand the picture of children’s curiosity and information-seeking towards targets of learning beyond the physical world.

Authors

• Peter Guandi Zhu, Stanford University
  Presenting Author

• Carol S Dweck, Stanford University

• Hyowon Gweon, Stanford University