Overhearing Brief Negative Messages Has Lasting Effects on Children's Attitudes Toward Novel Social Groups

The Collaborative Nature of Testimonial Learning

Children's testimonial learning often occurs in epistemic collaborations with others. In this paper, we will discuss ways in which cultural learning emerges in social and interpersonal contexts, and is intrinsically supported and guided by children's collaborative capacities. Much work in cultural learning has focused on children's examination of speaker and model characteristics, but more recent research has investigated the interactive aspects of testimonial exchanges. We will review evidence that children (1) participate in the interpersonal commitments that are shared in testimonial transactions by way of direct address and epistemic buck passing, (2) participate in social groups that affect their selective learning in nuanced ways, and (3) may detect epistemic harms by listeners who refuse to believe sincere and accurate speakers. Implications for conceptualizing children's testimonial learning as an interactive mechanism of collaboration will be discussed.

Does first-hand evidence undermine young children's initial trust in positive gossip? Evidence from 5- to 6-year-old children

What happens when children have formed an impression of a peer based on prior gossip, but later learn from direct observation that the gossip is untrue? We interviewed seventy 5- and 6-year-old children in Zhejiang, China. They first heard conflicting positive and negative gossip about an absent third party, and subsequently learned which piece of gossip was true. Initially, both 5- and 6-year-old children tended to endorse the positive rather than the negative gossip. However, when they learned about the inaccuracy of the positive gossip based on their own direct observation, 6-year-old children subsequently doubted it, whereas 5-year-old children showed no such shift. Taken together, the results show that when children decide what gossip to believe, they are initially swayed by its valence but with age they increasingly weigh gossip in relation to their own direct observation.

Children's affiliation toward peers reflected in their picture drawings

Previous studies have demonstrated that a picture-drawing task can be an indicator of the affiliation children have with their peers. When a child draws himself/herself along with a peer, the distance between them is assumed to represent the extent of the affiliation held by the child toward the peer: the shorter the distance is, the more affiliation the child has. However, some issues remain before the picture-drawing task is established as a way to measure children's affiliation, including the possibility that the instructions might bias the children's responses (Thomas & Gray, 1992), and inconsistency over where to measure in the children's drawings (e.g., Song et al., 2015). In this study, we focused on the above two issues and addressed whether the picture-drawing task can be used for measuring children's affiliation toward peers. We conducted our study in Japanese nursery schools with 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 676), who drew pictures of themselves and a classmate. Teachers rated how much the children had played with the drawn peer. We found that the more a child had an affiliative relationship with a peer, the shorter the distance between the drawn child and peer was when measuring the closest points and the center between the two drawn figures. Our research sheds light on the validity of the picture-drawing task for measuring children's affiliation.

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.

The impact of positive and negative testimony on children's attitudes toward others

Children can identify who is benevolent or malevolent not only through first-hand experiences and observations but also from the testimony of others. In this study, we investigated whether 5- and 7-year-olds (N = 128) would form their attitudes toward others after hearing testimony about that person’s past moral behavior and whether the valence of testimony would differently influence the children. In the positive condition, half of the participants gained information about three puppets: puppet A’s prosocial behavior by their own first-hand observation, testimony about puppet B’s past prosocial behavior, and testimony about puppet C’s past neutral behavior. In the negative condition, the other half also learned information about the three puppets: puppet A’s antisocial behavior by their own first-hand observation, testimony about puppet B’s past antisocial behavior, and testimony about puppet C’s past neutral behavior. Then they engaged in tasks that measured their behavioral attitudes toward the puppets and evaluated the goodness of each puppet to assess their attitudes at a cognitive level. Our results concluded that the children form their behavioral attitudes toward others based on testimony starting at the age of 7, and attitude formation at the cognitive level based on testimony is seen at age 5. Negative testimony, rather than positive testimony, influences the children’s attitudes toward others. In addition, the 7-year-olds’ use of testimony differs depending whether they are the allocators or the receivers of rewards. Our findings deepen understanding of how children rely on the verbal information around themselves when they navigate interactions with others.

Adults' pedagogical messages engender children's preference for self-resembling others

These studies investigate the influence of adults' explicit attention to commonalities of appearance on children's preference for individuals resembling themselves. Three findings emerged: (1) An adult's identification of two dolls' respective similarity to and difference from the child led 3-year-olds to prefer the similar doll (study 1, n = 32). (2) When the adult did not comment on similarity, children age 6 years but not younger preferred physically similar individuals (study 2, n = 68), suggesting that a spontaneous preference for physically similar others does not emerge before school age. (3) Four- but not 3-year-olds generalized an adult's pedagogical cues about similarity, leading them to prefer a self-resembling doll in a new context (study 3, n = 80). These findings collectively suggest that the preference for individuals resembling ourselves develops through a process of internalizing adults' attention to, and messages about, similarities of appearance.