The Communication of Naïve Theories of the Social World in Parent–Child Conversation

Rethinking Norm Psychology

Norms permeate human life. Most of people's activities can be characterized by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden-rules that are crucial in making people hyper-cooperative animals. In this article, I examine the current cognitive-evolutionary account of "norm psychology" and propose an alternative that is better supported by evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. The incumbent theory focuses on rules and claims that humans genetically inherit cognitive and motivational mechanisms specialized for processing these rules. The cultural-evolutionary alternative defines normativity in relation to behavior-compliance, enforcement, and commentary-and suggests that it depends on implicit and explicit processes. The implicit processes are genetically inherited and domain-general; rather than being specialized for normativity, they do many jobs in many species. The explicit processes are culturally inherited and domain-specific; they are constructed from mentalizing and reasoning by social interaction in childhood. The cultural-evolutionary, or "cognitive gadget," perspective suggests that people alive today-parents, educators, elders, politicians, lawyers-have more responsibility for sustaining normativity than the nativist view implies. People's actions not only shape and transmit the rules, but they also create in each new generation mental processes that can grasp the rules and put them into action.

Does disgust-eliciting propaganda shape children's attitudes toward novel immigrant groups?

Propaganda frequently leverages themes of dirtiness and disease to foster negative attitudes toward marginalized social groups. Although history suggests that this tactic is highly successful, empirical evidence is required to evaluate propaganda's potential efficacy. Inspired by previous evidence that children rapidly form attitudes about social groups, we conducted an exploratory investigation into whether 5- to 9-year-olds' (N = 48) judgments of novel foreign groups could be swayed by visually depicting one of these groups as disgusting in poster-sized illustrations. Across a wide battery of tasks, there was no clear indication that children readily internalize messages from propaganda in evaluating members of novel social groups. This finding held regardless of the type of disgustingness that was depicted in the propaganda, and generalized across the age range we investigated. Overall, our results are encouraging in a practical sense, suggesting that children are not easily swayed by negative misrepresentations of immigrants in propaganda.

Maternal Communication with Preschool Children about Morality: A Coding Scheme for a Book-Sharing Task

Background: Preventing interpersonal violence requires understanding the moral development and determinants of child aggression. Communication about moral values and concerns by parents is theoretically important in this process. We aimed to develop a coding system to measure mothers' communication about morality with young children and test its psychometric properties. Method: The cross-sectional study included a subsample (n = 200) of mothers and their four-year-old children in a population-based Brazilian birth cohort. Mothers and children were filmed while looking at a picture book together, containing events of aggression, taking away without asking, and several prosocial behaviours. Films were transcribed and a coding system, including 17 items, was developed to measure the maternal moral judgements and the explanations communicated to their children. Inter-rater reliability was estimated, and exploratory factor analysis performed. Results: Mothers judged acts of physical aggression as wrong more frequently than taking away material goods without asking; most mothers communicated about the emotional consequences of wrong behaviour with their child. Two latent factors of moral communication were identified, interpersonal moral concern and the expression of material moral concern. There was excellent inter-rater reliability between the two coders. Conclusions: Parent-child book-sharing provides a means to measure maternal communication about morality with their children. The coding system of this study measures both communication about interpersonal moral concern and material moral concern. Further studies with larger samples are suggested to investigate the importance of these dimensions of caregiver moral communication for children's moral development.

How cues to social categorization impact children's inferences about social categories

Social categorization involves two crucial processes: First, children seek properties on which they can categorize individuals, i.e., they learn to form social categories; then children make inferences based on social category membership and might develop affective responses toward social categories. Over the last decade, a growing number of research in developmental psychology started to use novel social categories to investigate how children learn and reason about social categories. To date, three types of cues have been put forward as means to form social categories, namely linguistic, visual, and behavioral cues. Based on social category membership, children draw inferences about the shared properties of social category members and about how social category members ought to behave and interact with each other. With additional input, children might apply essentialist beliefs to social categories and develop affective responses toward social categories. This article aims to provide key insights on the development of stereotypes and intergroup biases by reviewing recent works that investigated how children learn to form novel social categories and the kind of inferences they make about these novel social categories.

Parents reinforce the formation of first impressions in conversation with their children

The tendency to form first impressions from facial appearance emerges early in development. One route through which these impressions may be learned is parent-child interaction. In Study 1, 24 parent-child dyads (children aged 5–6 years, 50% male, 83% White British) were given four computer generated faces and asked to talk about each of the characters shown. Study 2 (children aged 5–6 years, 50% male, 92% White British) followed a similar procedure using images of real faces. Across both studies, around 13% of conversation related to the perceived traits of the individuals depicted. Furthermore, parents actively reinforced their children’s face-trait mappings, agreeing with the opinions they voiced on approximately 40% of occasions across both studies. Interestingly, although parents often encouraged face-trait mappings in their children, their responses to questionnaire items suggested they typically did not approve of judging others based on their appearance.

Categories convey prescriptive information across domains and development

Young children display a pervasive bias to assume that what they observe in the world reflects how things are supposed to be. The current studies examined the nature of this bias by testing whether it reflects a particular form of reasoning about human social behaviors or a more general feature of category representations. Children aged 4 to 9 years and adults (N = 747) evaluated instances of nonconformity among members of novel biological and human social kinds. Children held prescriptive expectations for both animal and human categories; in both cases, they said it was wrong for a category member to engage in category-atypical behavior. These prescriptive judgments about categories depended on the extent to which people saw the pictured individual examples as representative of coherent categories. Thus, early prescriptive judgments appear to rely on the interplay between general conceptual biases and domain-specific beliefs about category structure.

Embedding Scientific Explanations Into Storybooks Impacts Children's Scientific Discourse and Learning

Children’s understanding of unobservable scientific entities largely depends on testimony from others, especially through parental explanations that highlight the mechanism underlying a scientific entity. Mechanistic explanations are particularly helpful in promoting children’s conceptual understanding, yet they are relatively rare in parent–child conversations. The current study aimed to increase parent–child use of mechanistic conversation by modeling this language in a storybook about the mechanism of electrical circuits. We also examined whether an increase in mechanistic conversation was associated with science learning outcomes, measured at both the dyadic- and child-level. In the current study, parents and their 4- to 5-year-old children (N = 60) were randomly assigned to read a book containing mechanistic explanations (n = 32) or one containing non-mechanistic explanations (n = 28). After reading the book together, parent–child joint understanding of electricity’s mechanism was tested by asking the dyad to assemble electrical components of a circuit toy so that a light would turn on. Finally, child science learning outcomes were examined by asking children to assemble a novel circuit toy and answer comprehension questions to gauge their understanding of electricity’s mechanism. Results indicate that dyads who read storybooks containing mechanistic explanations were (1) more successful at completing the circuit (putting the pieces together to make the light turn on) and (2) used more mechanistic language than dyads assigned to the non-mechanistic condition. Children in the mechanistic condition also had better learning outcomes, but only if they engaged in more mechanistic discourse with their parent. We discuss these results using a social interactionist framework to highlight the role of input and interaction for learning. We also highlight how these results implicate everyday routines such as book reading in supporting children’s scientific discourse and understanding.

How intergroup relation moderates group bias in Third-Party Punishment

Two experiments were conducted to investigate how intergroup relation moderates group bias in Third-Party Punishment (TPP) of selfishness. Participants competed or cooperated with the other group and then performed a TPP task in which they could reduce an allocator's benefits after paying a low cost (paying 1/3 unit deducts 1 unit of the allocator in Experiment 1, n = 76) or a high cost (paying 1 unit deducts 1 unit of the allocator in Experiment 2, n = 81). The results supported the "mere-preference hypothesis" of group bias, showing that people were more likely to tolerate their ingroups while punishing outgroups more harshly. Furthermore, when the cost was low, competition increased people's punishment toward outgroups' selfishness but not toward ingroup members, thus enlarging the group bias. When the cost was high, however, this effect disappeared, indicating that people consider a "cost-to-impact ratio" when selectively enforcing the fairness norm in intergroup conflicts. Our findings suggest how intergroup relation and cost-benefit analysis interact together to influence the group bias in TPP, providing insights into mechanisms underlying the maintenance of fairness norms and decision-making in a group context.

Groups as moral boundaries: A developmental perspective

In this chapter we present the perspective that social groups serve as moral boundaries. Social groups establish the bounds within which people hold moral obligations toward one another. The belief that people are morally obligated toward fellow social group members, but not toward members of other groups, is an early-emerging feature of human cognition, arising out of domain-general processes in conceptual development. We review evidence that supports this account from the adult and child moral cognition literature, and we describe the developmental processes by which people come to view social groups as shaping moral obligation. We conclude with suggestions about how this account can inform the study of social cognitive development more broadly, as well as how it can be used to promote positive moral socialization.

The Development of Social Categorization

Social categorization is a universal mechanism for making sense of a vast social world with roots in perceptual, conceptual, and social systems. These systems emerge strikingly early in life and undergo important developmental changes across childhood. The development of social categorization entails identifying which ways of classifying people are culturally meaningful, how these categories might be used to predict, explain, and evaluate the behavior of other people, and how one's own identity relates to these systems of categorization and representation. Social categorization can help children simplify and understand their social environment but has detrimental consequences in the forms of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Thus, understanding how social categorization develops is a central problem for the cognitive, social, and developmental sciences. This review details the multiple developmental processes that underlie this core psychological capacity.

Beliefs About Moral Obligation Structure Children's Social Category-Based Expectations

Young children view social category members as morally obligated toward one another, and expect these obligations to shape people's social behavior. The present work investigates how children specify which behaviors are constrained by social categories in this way. In two studies (N = 128), 4- and 5-year-old children predicted that morally positive behaviors would be directed toward in-group members, and that morally negative behaviors would be directed toward out-group members, but did not hold equally strong expectations about behaviors described as positive or negative for reasons irrelevant to morality. Thus, notions of morality are embedded within children's representations of social categories, such that when learning about novel moral norms, children immediately expect those obligations to uniquely hold within social groups.

Revisiting Young Children's Understanding of the Psychological Causes of Behavior

In 1989, Miller and Aloise challenged the prevailing belief that preschoolers tend to explain others' behavior in terms of external events or a person's physical attributes and have little understanding of psychological causes. That review documented preschoolers' understanding of, and even preference for, psychological causes as part of an emerging renaissance in developmental social-cognitive research. The present, updated review (97 articles, participant ages 3 months to 6 years) suggests the emergence of a transformative new perspective in which social-cognition is balanced between social and cognitive aspects rather than tilted toward cognition. Recent research on infants' awareness of mental states, young children's understanding of social categories and their judgments of the trustworthiness of informants, and cultural context reveals various ways in which preschoolers' social-causal reasoning is social.