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.

Group Membership Trumps Shared Preference in Five-Year-Olds’ Resource Allocation, Social Preference, and Social Evaluation

This study investigated five-year-olds’ priority between shared preference and group membership in resource allocation, social preference, and social evaluation. Using a forced-choice resource allocation task and a friend choice task, we first demonstrate that five-year-old children distribute more resources to and prefer a character who shares a preference with them when compared to a character who has a different preference. Then, we pitted the shared preference against group membership to investigate children’s priority. Children prioritized group membership over shared preference, allotting more resources to and showing more preference toward characters in the same group who did not share their preferences than those from a different group who shared their preferences. Lastly, children evaluated resource allocation and social preference in others that prioritized group membership or shared preference. Children regarded prioritization of group membership more positively than prioritization of shared preference from the perspective of a third person. The results suggest that children by five years of age consider group membership as of greater importance than shared preference not only in their own resource allocation and social preference, but also in their evaluation of others’ resource allocation and liking.

Blurred boundaries between us and them: Do young children affiliate with outgroup members with shared preferences?

Children tend to assume that their ingroup members are more likely to share their preferences than outgroup members, but group membership and shared preferences need not be congruent in reality. The current study investigated 76 3- to 6-year-old children's baseline intergroup attitudes in a minimal group context and their subsequent attitudes after being informed that either (a) their ingroup, but not their outgroup, shared their preferences or (b) their outgroup, but not their ingroup, shared their preferences. Cues about shared preferences affected children's intergroup biases to some extent, such that children tended to like their outgroup more and to allocate resources fairly among their ingroup and outgroup when they learned that their outgroup shared their preferences. However, intergroup biases were robust in some measures, such that children reported high ingroup liking and demonstrated ingroup favoritism in behavioral attribution regardless of whether they learned that their ingroup or outgroup shared their preferences. Children were also administered measures tapping into cognitive flexibility, but there was no coherent evidence that children's cognitive flexibility was related to their initial intergroup attitudes or their subsequent intergroup attitudes after learning that their ingroup or outgroup shared their preferences. The current study demonstrates a nuanced picture of intergroup biases, such that these biases might not be entirely entrenched but can nonetheless be robust in the face of conflicting cues about group membership and shared preferences. Furthermore, the importance of investigating intergroup biases at the individual level, rather than only at the group level, is discussed.

The rare preference effect: Statistical information influences social affiliation judgments

Shared preferences-liking the same things-facilitate and strengthen bonds between individuals. However, not all shared preferences are equally meaningful; sharing a rare preference with someone is often more exciting and meaningful than sharing a common preference. Here we present evidence for the rare preference effect: Participants chose to interact with (Experiment 1), and endorsed interactions between (Experiment 2), individuals who shared a rare preference, rather than those who shared a common preference, and this tendency increased with the relative rarity of the preference. While having a preference usually implies knowing and liking something, the presence of shared knowledge alone was sufficient to give rise to the rare preference effect (Experiments 3 & 4). Further, we find that social affiliation judgments are modulated by the causal process by which individuals came to have shared knowledge: Participants preferred to interact with someone who acquired a shared preference deliberately rather than accidentally (Experiment 5). In addition to the many cultural and emotional factors that drive mutual attraction, these results suggest that people's decisions about with whom to interact are systematically influenced by the statistics of the social environment.

Being a truck driver in Brazil: From implicit self-stereotypes to system justification

Abstract Close to two million people currently work in Brazil's road transport sector, the country's leading logistical area. Most are self-employed individuals. The objective of this research project was to garner an understanding of the perceptions that Brazilian truck drivers hold regarding themselves. Eight experienced drivers were interviewed, starting from the question â"What is it like being a truck driver in Brazil?", and their responses were analyzed in accordance with social discourse studies. Five main categories – with specific subdivisions – were identified, relating to motivations to work in this area, contextual elements, and positive, group, and negative self-image. It is concluded that self-stereotypes play an important role in maintaining the situation of disadvantage and precarious working conditions that affect truck drivers.

The development and importance of shared reality in the domains of opinion, morality, and religion

The importance of shared reality emerges early in human development. Infants and young children notice when others share their beliefs, and information about shared beliefs influences their social judgments. This article reviews recent research on the importance of shared beliefs in three domains that have been widely investigated over the past several years-opinions, moral views, and religious beliefs. I argue that shared religious beliefs appear especially influential and suggest several reasons why this might be the case, including the perceived link between religion and morality as well as the strong role that religious beliefs play in personal identity. Future research can further test these possibilities.

Shared-Reality Development in Childhood

Many significant changes occur during human childhood, including cognitive, social-cognitive, and socioemotional changes. This article reviews some key phenomena associated with some of these changes and attempts to capture them within a single conceptual umbrella—changes in children’s shared realities with others. Shared reality is the experience that you have an inner state about something (e.g., a feeling or belief or concern about something) that is shared by others (a person or group). Four phases of shared-reality development are proposed: Phase 1 (6–12 months) shared feelings; Phase 2 (18–24 months) shared practices; Phase 3 (3–5 years) shared self-guides; Phase 4 (9–13 years) shared coordinated roles. In each phase, a new way that children interact with and relate to others emerges, and the emergence of each new shared-reality mode has significant self-regulatory and social consequences. These consequences include both major benefits for children and potential costs—trade-offs of being human.

Shared cultural knowledge: Effects of music on young children's social preferences

Adults use cultural markers to discern the structure of the social landscape. Such markers may also influence the social preferences of young children, who tend to conform to their own group and prefer others who do so. However, the forces that propel these preferences are unknown. Here, we use social preferences based on music to investigate these forces in four- and five-year-old children. First, we establish that children prefer other children whose favorite songs are familiar to them. Then we show that this effect depends on shared knowledge: children both prefer others who know songs they themselves know, and avoid others who know songs they do not know, irrespective of the target children’s liking of the songs. These results suggest that young children have a remarkably selective sensitivity to shared cultural knowledge. Shared knowledge may be a powerful determinant of children’s social preferences, both because it underpins effective communication and because it is conveyed by others through social interactions and therefore can serve as a marker of social group identity.

In the name of God: How children and adults judge agents who act for religious versus secular reasons

Many people are guided by religious beliefs, but judgments of religiously and secularly motivated individuals remain unclear. We investigated reasoning about religiously versus secularly motivated characters among 5- to 10-year-olds and adults. In Study 1, theist and non-theist children reported similar attitudes toward theists; however, large differences emerged between theist and non-theist adults. Study 2 obtained similar results using a continuous, rather than forced choice, measure of preference. Additionally, Studies 2-3 tested two explanations for the stronger influence of religious background on adults' versus children's responses. Study 2 did not find strong evidence for the theistic majority account, which posits that the greater perceived prevalence of theists as compared with non-theists influenced children's responses more than adults' responses. The results of Study 3 were consistent with the intuition account, which argues that non-theist adults had effortfully overridden the teleological intuitions that may have influenced children's responses in Studies 1-2 and potentially led children to prefer characters whose beliefs were in line with children's own intuitions. The degree to which teleological intuitions persisted implicitly among adults predicted those adults' pro-theist preferences. These findings offer connections between religious judgments and other areas of social cognition, such as social preferences and teleology.