Children's use of choice and linguistic framing to re-construct social hierarchies

• In Event: 3-027 - The socialization of prejudice: New insights from international samples

Integrative Statement

How does linguistic framing influence children’s learning about social hierarchies and status? Recent research suggests adults’ explicit and implicit biases are communicated to children in myriad ways, including via verbal and non-verbal cues. Here, we explore how verbal framing shapes children’s interpretation of other people’s non-verbal choices, as children infer information about social groups and status.
Past research demonstrates that children use the statistical patterns of others’ object (Kushnir, Xi, & Wellman, 2010) and social choices (Heck, Kushnir, & Kinzler, in prep; CDS 2017) to infer an agent’s preferences. But notably, the linguistic or social framing provided (e.g., Garvin and Woodward, 2015) can influence the degree to which children infer social information from other people’s patterns of choices.
Here, we explore how linguistic framing impacts children’s interpretations of other people’s choices to infer information about hierarchies among social groups. In Study 1, we presented 5-10-year-old children with a task in which they viewed an agent make choices among individuals. Children were randomly assigned to a “social framing” condition (N = 49), in which they are told that the puppet likes some friends more than others; or to a “no framing” condition (N = 49). Next, all children saw an agent make choices among all potential pairs of four kinds of “friends” (toy animals). The agent expressed a hierarchical pattern of preferences: A>B>C>D. Children were next asked to reconstruct the hierarchy among the toy animals. Older children were able to successfully reconstruct the agent’s hierarchical social preferences across groups. Among younger children, there was a greater overall pattern of errors, and children in the social framing condition were better able to reconstruct the hierarchy than were children in the no-framing condition. Across ages, the social framing condition impacted children’s perceptions of the nature of the hierarchy. After asking participants about the agent’s preferences, we next asked them which individual is the “leader” and which is the “helper” (in counterbalanced order). Participants in the social framing condition inferred that the most-chosen agent was also the leader, but did not make analogous predictions in the no-framing condition.
In Study 2, we presented younger children with a simplified social framing condition where children had to track 3 rather than 4 total agents (children (Mage = 5 years; N = 36). Again, children were able to successfully reconstruct the hierarchy of A>B>C. Children also predicted that the agent chosen most is the “leader” and the one chosen least is the “helper.”
These studies provide evidence that children are able to track hierarchies of an agent’s social preferences and can reconstruct those choices across individuals. Moreover, linguistic social framing can influence how children view people’s non-verbal choices among agents in the world. Finally, children view other people’s non-verbal choices as providing information about different agents’ relative status in the world, but these inferences are especially sensitive to verbal framing. Together, these studies suggest that children are tracking patterns of hierarchy across agents, which may inform their early thinking about social groups.

Authors

• Isobel Heck, Cornell University
  Presenting Author

• Katherine Kinzler, Cornell University
  Non-Presenting Author