Poster #198 - Young Children’s Food- and Artifact-Based Social Inferences

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Understanding the nature of other people’s relationships—for example, deducing whether people are family, friends, or foes—is useful for navigating the social world. Such information can guide one’s own behavior toward others and can also help one interpret and predict other people’s behaviors. How do children make inferences about the closeness of other people’s relationships based on their common or different preferences?

Culture influences the things people like and dislike, so understanding whether or not people share preferences may provide insight into their relationship. For instance, artifact possessions and preferences are strongly linked to geographical location and culture (Gosden & Marshall, 1999), and food preferences and rituals are also culturally significant (Fischler, 1988; Peter & George, 1980). Thus, these items may provide particularly rich social insight. Beginning in infancy, children attend to adults’ evaluations of foods to predict their social behaviors (Liberman et al., 2014). Building on this research, we investigate whether children attend to people’s common assessments of different foods and artifacts to infer the closeness of their relationships.

Participants (N=128, ages 4–6 years) were randomly assigned to view pairs of characters expressing opinions about either foods or artifacts. Across trials within each condition, we varied whether the targets possessed the same or different items, and whether the targets shared the same evaluation of their item: they either both liked their item (matched-positive), both disliked their item (matched-negative), or one disliked their item and the other liked their item (mismatched). Following each trial, participants rated the targets’ closeness on a 5-point scale ranging from strangers (0) to best friends (4). See Figure 1.

A repeated-measures ANOVA with valence (matched-positive, matched-negative, mismatched) and item (same, different) as within-subjects factors and condition (food, artifact) as a between-subjects factor revealed no condition effect, F(1, 126) = 0.72, p=.40, ηp2=.006. However, there were main effects of valence (F(2, 125) = 53.66, p<.001) and item (F(1, 126) = 14.77, p<.001). Both main effects were qualified by a significant valence by item interaction, F(2, 125) = 5.70, p<.01, ηp2=.084. When valence was mismatched, participants provided lower closeness ratings than when valence was matched (p<.001), regardless of whether tar gets possessed the same or different items (p=.86). However, when valence was matched, participants rated targets as closer if they possessed the same item than if they possessed different items (ps<.05). See Table 1.

In sum, children consider people’s possessions and preferences when drawing inferences about the closeness of their relationships. Further, the results suggest that the expression of divergent affect may be a particularly strong indicator that two people are not in a close relationship. In ongoing work, we are extending this research to more real-world contexts, including investigating children’s inferences in a first-person context. For instance, do children feel closer to peers with whom they share preferences? Collectively, this work will shed light on children’s early reasoning about the link between item preferences and social relationships.

Authors

• Rachel Ann King, Cornell University
  Presenting Author

• Zoe Liberman, University of California Santa Barbara
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ashley E. Jordan, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katherine Kinzler, Cornell University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kristin Shutts, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author