1,721,032 research outputs found
Children protest moral and conventional violations more when they believe actions are freely chosen
No full textYoung children spontaneously engage in normative evaluations of others’ actions and actively enforce social norms. It is unclear, however, how flexible and integrated this early norm psychology is. The current study explored this question by testing whether children in their “real-life” normative evaluation of actions consider the actor’s freedom of choice. Children witnessed different appropriate acts or mistakes (conventional or moral) by an agent under free or constrained circumstances. Across the two types of norms, participants protested less if a mistake occurred under constrained conditions than if it occurred under free conditions. Furthermore, they laid different weight on the actor’s free choice in the two conditions. While refraining from blaming the agent for inappropriate constrained acts in the moral scenario, children still criticized a social conventional mistake under constrained conditions (although less than under free conditions), indicating that free choice is a more prominent factor in moral evaluations than in conventional evaluations. Thus, two domains of social cognition, normativity and theory of mind, are functionally integrated already early in development
DO PARENTS DIFFER IN THEIR SCAFFOLDING OF PRESCHOOL SONS AND DAUGHTERS DURING A SPATIAL ACTIVITY?
No full textSpatial ability is important to cognitive functioning and academic outcomes. However, many studies report a male advantage in spatial task performance which has been attributed to biological factors as well as environmental factors, such as play experience that is spatial. In the present study, we examine how parents of preschool-aged children interact with daughters versus sons, examining if parent scaffolding during a structured spatial task differs with child sex. Participants were 45 (25 girls, 20 boys) 4- and 5- year-olds (M = 4.82, SD = 0.42) and their parent. Parent-child dyads were invited to create a pattern using magnets of different shapes and sizes. Parents provided more guidance to younger children. The result yielded a significant effect of child sex on iconic parents’ gestures, but not any other parent behaviors. Parents, whether interacting with a son or daughter, actively guided their children using pedagogical questions, spatial language, gestures, and correction
HOW DO RACE AND RELIGION IMPACT CHILDREN’S MORAL EXPECTATIONS OF OTHERS?
No full text45 pagesReligion and race are powerful social markers that impact children’s moral evaluations and guide their affiliative preferences. Past research has found that children expect Christians to have good morals, and similarly, children associate kindness with White as opposed to Black people. However, no research yet has tested how children rank the two dimensions in their moral judgments. In the present study, we investigate how children would evaluate individuals when religion and race were pitted against each other and suggested different predictions about their moral behaviors. Five to 10-year-old children (N = 72) were presented with pairs of individuals matched in gender. One individual was White and the other one was Black. Children were told the White person is not a Christian, while the Black person is a Christian. Then, children were told a story depicting a moral action (e.g., picked up the trash on the ground and threw it away) and asked which one of the two individuals performed the action. Children’s affiliative preferences were also assessed. The results suggested that the children expected the Black Christian to perform the moral action and in return exhibited more desire to affiliate with the Black Christian. In particular, relative to Non-Christian children, Christian children in this sample were more likely to choose the Black Christian as completing the moral action and tended to affiliate more with the Black Christian. Thus, 5- to 10-year-old children from this study prioritize religion over race when forming moral expectations, which may inform their affiliative choices
Children’s Group Bias in Evaluating other’s Third-party Punishment
No full text35 pagesPast studies have shown that people favor their own group members when they themselves are the third-party punisher. But in real life, most people do not have adequate power to enforce justice by themselves. Instead, they are most likely to enforce moral norms by choosing who to grant the power to punish (through election, petition, public discussion, etc.), and such choice relies crucially on their evaluation of the third-party punishment and the punisher. Do children have group bias when evaluating other’s moral punishment at its emergence? In this study (N = 197, age 3-7), we found that in evaluating other’s third-party punishment, children showed in-group favoritism toward in-group perpetrators and out-group discrimination toward out-group perpetrators, evaluating a third-party punishment more positively when it is enforced on an out-group perpetrator than an in-group perpetrator. However, the group affiliation of the victim did not induce biased evaluation for a third-party punishment. In this Chinese sample, we also found that children are biased in judging the deserved punishment of a transgression and in their third-party punishment behavior. They favored in-group perpetrators, which was in accordance with previous study conducted on western samples. We also found that over development, children judged a transgression as more serious and deserve more punishment, and gave increasingly higher evaluation toward other’s third-party punishment. Taken together, this study added to the evidence that group bias is rooted deeply in ontology, and punishment toward injustice is biased even at its emergence
Learning About Causes from People, and about People from Causes: Statistical inference and Social Causal Reasoning
No full textDo spatial relational labels facilitate three-year-old children’s 2D to 3D transfer of relational information in a spatial mapping task?
No full text40 pagesFor young children of 3 years, relational reasoning, as when children are asked to recognize the commonality of a type of spatial configuration between two objects, remains a challenging skill. Children are biased to match on the entities of a relation, such as the objects in a spatial array, over the type of spatial configuration. One tool for overcoming this difficulty has been the use of relational labels, which have been shown to be direct powerful tools - capable of drawing attention to subsurface relational structure (Loewenstein & Gentner, 2005). As young as 18 months, children benefit from hearing a relational term, such as a spatial locative term (Casasola, 2005), shifting from encoding only the objects to instead attending to the type of spatial relation between those objects. This pilot study examines the effectiveness of relational labels, specifically the spatial labels of “Left,” “Middle,” and “Right”, when young children are tasked with encoding a relational structure and transferring it from the digital to the physical world. Results are compared with children’s comprehension of the labels, and suggestions for further work are made
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Young Children Consider Individual Authority and Collective Agreement When Deciding Who Can Change Rules
Get PDFYoung children demonstrate awareness of normativity in various domains of social learning. It is unclear, however, whether children recognize that rules can be changed in certain contexts and by certain people or groups. Across three studies, we provided empirical evidence that children consider individual authority and collective agreement when reasoning about who can change rules. In Study 1, children of 4 to 7 years old watched videos of children playing simply sorting and stacking games in groups or alone. Across conditions the group game was initiated 1) by one child, 2) by collaborative agreement, or 3) by an adult authority. In the group games with a rule initiated by one child, children attributed ability to change rules only to that individual and not his/her friends, and mentioned ownership and authority in their explanations. When the rule was initiated collaboratively, older children said that no individual could change the rule, while young children said that either individual could do so. When an adult initiated the rule children stated that only the adult could change it. In contrast, children always endorsed a child’s decision to change his own solitary play, and never endorsed any child’s ability to change moral and conventional rules in daily life. Age differences corresponded to beliefs about friendship and agreement in peer play (Study 2) and disappeared when the decision process behind and normative force of collaboratively initiated rules was clarified (Study 3). These results show important connections between normativity and considerations of authority and collaboration in early childhood
CHILDREN'S DEVELOPING UNDERSTANDING OF CHOICE ACROSS CULTURES
No full textTo successfully navigate the world, human beings must identify the choices they can make as well as the constraints on their choices. These perceptions and beliefs about choice can be influenced by multiple factors, some of which originate from the external world (e.g., physical laws, socio-moral norms) and some of which originate from the internal world (e.g., desires, goals, motivations). Large individual and cultural variations exist in people’s perceptions and beliefs about choices. Importantly, these views about choice often guide actions, both the regulation of one’s own actions and the interpretation of others’ actions. This dissertation presents a series of studies that investigate how views about choice develop throughout childhood and across cultures, as well as how these views relate to children’s developmental outcomes — both the regulation of one’s own actions and the evaluations of others’ actions. I will discuss the important implications these studies have on children’s self-regulation and goal-pursuit, as well as their social evaluations and moral judgment
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