Shared Social Groups or Shared Experiences? The effect of similarity on children's perspective taking.

• In Event: Early Representations of Caregiver Relationships and Consequences for Social Cognition

Abstract

Similarity to a communicative partner can foster effective communication (Greenaway et al., 2015). However, closeness or similarity to those we know well can in fact decrease perspective-taking, since overestimating shared knowledge can lead to egocentric errors (Savitsky et al., 2011). The current studies investigate how two types of similarity to a communicative partner (shared social groups, shared experiences) influence children’s perspective-taking in a communication task.
96 4- to 6-year-olds played a game (the director task; e.g., Keysar et al., 2000) which required them to take their partner’s perspective. The task used a 4x4 shelf with four slots occluded to the partner, but visible to the child. Children received ambiguous instructions from the partner to move an object in the shelf (e.g. dinosaur), however there was often a second object in one of the occluded slots (e.g., a different coloured dinosaur) which matched the instruction. Children needed to use perspective-taking to select the dinosaur that their partner could also see. In Study 1, children played with 2 strangers who were from the same/different social groups to the participant. Social groups were manipulated by presenting facts about each partner’s geographic location (lives in the same city or lives in a faraway city), accent, and knowledge (or absence of knowledge) of a book or tv program the child enjoys. In Study 2, children either played with their caregiver (someone who they are close to and have many shared experiences with) or a stranger (someone who they are not close to and have no shared experiences).
In Study 1, children showed no difference in their perspective taking for the similar social group partner or the dissimilar partner (reaching for target objects, egocentric first looks; all p>.05). However, children made significantly more first looks to the correct object with the less preferred partner (p=.024), and a greater number of children performed better (i.e., made more correct reaches) when playing with their less preferred partner (n=24) than their preferred partner (n=13), though this trend did not reach significance (p=.099). Furthering this, when playing with their caregiver or a stranger in Study 2, pre-registered analyses showed that children took marginally longer to make decisions when playing with a caregiver (p=.057); they made numerically less correct reaches when playing with a parent (p=.095); and significantly fewer children performed at ceiling when playing with their caregiver than with the stranger (p=.02). Non-perspective taking trials and an executive function task (Day/Night task; Gerstadt, Hong, & Diamond, 1994) were not affected by partner (p>.1).
These results suggest that shared experiences/closeness, like children have with their caregivers, may lead to an over-estimation of shared knowledge and in fact hinder perspective-taking. Interestingly, though people from similar social groups may also have many pieces of shared knowledge, children’s perspective taking was not affected by the social groups of their partner, suggesting that shared experiences or closeness specifically may cause this increased egocentrism.

Authors

• Laura Anderson, Victoria University of Wellington
  Presenting Author

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

• Alia Martin
  Non-Presenting Author