Preschoolers Negatively Evaluate Social Excluders, But Don’t Always Disprefer Them

• In Event: Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Topic - Social Relationships

Abstract

Social exclusion is harmful and places children at risk for a wide range of negative outcomes, including poor self-regulation and internalizing problems (Stenseng et al., 2014). To reduce the consequences of exclusion, children use strategies that increase feelings of social belonging and increase the likelihood of connecting with social partners. For instance, children imitate others more faithfully, sit closer to others, and think more about affiliation after observing exclusion (Marinovic et al., 2017; Song et al., 2015; Watson-Jones et al., 2014). However, promoting oneself as a good social partner is insufficient to ensure future inclusion. It is also critical that children selectively direct these efforts toward people likely to include them, by assessing a potential partner’s history of inclusivity, forming evaluations based on prior actions, and making decisions based on these evaluations.
Little work to date has directly investigated whether preschool-age children form evaluations based on people’s prior play history and if these evaluations inform subsequent partner choices (Hwang & Markson, 2020). While 5- and 6-year-olds evaluate excluders as mean and prefer to play with includers, 3- and 4-year-olds, unexpectedly, show no preference for play partners, even while evaluating excluders negatively. Dissociations between evaluations and preferences are not typically found at this age, and the current study examined this pattern using different methodology.
We examined 3- to 6-year-old children’s evaluations and preferences of social excluders. We also included measures to examine whether children detected exclusion or remembered who the excluders were because prior research indicates that preschoolers’ responses may be influenced by memory demands.
In the current study, children (N = 69, 3- 6-year-olds) watched two videos: an inclusion video where two mice and a dog threw a ball to each other equally and an exclusion video with new characters where two mice threw the ball to each other and left out a dog. After each video, children indicated whether they detected social exclusion and how nice they thought the mice were. When children completed both videos, they answered a memory check question about both videos and identified which mouse they wanted to play with. Finally, the experimenter probed children’s play choices by asking questions concerning their motivations for choosing a given play partner.
Both older (5 and 6) and younger (3 and 4) children evaluated excluders (M = 2.83, SD = 1.98) more negatively than includers (M = 5.29, SD = 1.32, V = 65.5, p < 0.01). However, only older children preferred to play with the includers (30 of 34, p < 0.01). Although younger children detected exclusion readily (χ^2(1) = 27.03, p < 0.01), and accurately remembered the events (33 of 35, p < 0.01), they showed no preference for either character (19 of 35, p = 0.37). This work replicates the dissociation found by Hwang & Markson (2020) and suggests that future work should examine whether this pattern is specific to social exclusion or if it is indicative of a more general developmental pattern underlying how children make social preferences.

Authors

• Amanda Mae Woodward, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
  Presenting Author

• Lindsay A Horen
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sarah Knoll, University of Maryland, College Park
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jonathan S Beier, Other
  Non-Presenting Author