Australian and Malaysian Children’s Conformity with Inefficient Tool Use

• In Event: 3-131 - Examining the Development of Conformity Across Diverse Social Contexts

Integrative Statement

Different cultural groups develop problem solving methods suited to their living environment and style. If such group-specific skills and conventions are to be maintained they must be transmitted to future generations with high fidelity. In line with this, children become competent members of, and ensure their status among, their cultural in-group via high-fidelity imitation and conforming with group norms. As part of this, they will identify normative functions/usages of artefacts and rely on information agreed upon by the majority to do so. However, there may be instances when the motivation of instrumental functionality is stronger than the social motivation to conform, whereby children eschew adult modeled inefficient object-directed actions and rely on their own judgements about object affordances when learning how to handle artefacts.

What remains unclear is the extent to which children will, when presented with an instrumentally-oriented task coupled with conventional framing (e.g., “everyone uses this”), make functional decisions (e.g., selecting a more efficient tool) or normative learning decisions (e.g., conforming with an inefficient modeled behavior). We compared sixty-seven 4- to 6-year-olds from three contrasting locations: A WEIRD society (i.e., those classified as Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic) – a large urban city in Australia, and two non-WEIRD societies which include a main town and a group of rural indigenous communities in Malaysia. Children were engaged in two novel tasks involving retrieval of stickers from two distinct apparatuses: One involving lifting up a mini bucket from inside a tube, and the other to push a mini container out of a rectangular box. To complete the tasks, they could either construct a tool based on prior demonstrations (using Lego; magnets), or use a readily available alternative (a pipe cleaner; a dowel), where the sub-optimal options were framed as normative. Based on the assumption that Australia is broadly categorized as an individualist and Malaysia as a collectivist, we predicted the former group to be less inclined to conform. Children from town area and indigenous communities of Malaysia were expected to have similar levels of conformity, despite the difference in socio-economic-status and lifestyle.    

Our data was analyzed using a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) with a binomial distribution, as well as a random participant intercept to account for within-subject correlations on the two tasks. This GLMM revealed a significant fixed effect of location. Surprisingly, pairwise comparisons showed no difference in conformity between Australian city and Malaysian town children, where approximately 60-70% of them conformed to pursue sub-optimal options. This rate is higher than that shown in some previous work on children’s conformity towards inefficient attempts, and the universality between the two cultural groups is contrary to expectation where the independent cultural framework of the Australian children was anticipated to lead to lower levels. Intriguingly, the conformity rates of Malaysian indigenous children was significantly higher than that of either Malaysian town or Australian city.

This research affords insights into variation and universality in cultural expectations surrounding conformist behavior and social learning. Methodological issues and considerations for future research will be discussed.

Authors

• Frankie T.K. Fong, University of Queensland
  Presenting Author

• Mark Nielsen, The University of Queensland
  Non-Presenting Author