Is It Personal or Is It Social? The Interaction of Knowledge Domain and Statistical Evidence in U.S. and Chinese Preschoolers' Social Generalizations

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. General 2024-07, Vol.153 (7), p.1887-1903
• Main Authors: Flanagan, Teresa, Zhao, Xin (Alice), Xu, Fei, Kushnir, Tamar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Action learning; Children & youth; Chinese Cultural Groups; Cross cultural studies; Early Childhood Development; Female; Games; Human; Human agency; Knowledge Level; Male; Preferences; Psychosocial Development; Social Cognition; Social interaction; Statistical Data
• ISSN: 0096-3445; 1939-2222; 1939-2222
• DOI: 10.1037/xge0001605

Children make inferences about the social world by observing human actions. However, human actions can be ambiguous: They can be sources of information about personal, idiosyncratic characteristics of individuals or socially shared knowledge. In two cross-cultural studies (N = 420; Mage = 4.05 years, SD = 0.77, 47% female), we ask if U.S. and Chinese children's inferences about whether an action is personal or social vary by domain, statistical evidence, and culture. We did this with a generalization method: Preschoolers learn about one agent's actions and then are asked what they think a new agent will do. Low rates of generalization suggest children inferred something unique to an individual, while high rates suggest that children inferred that the action represented socially shared knowledge. In a mixed between- and within-participant design, children observed agents demonstrate sequences of statistically random (or nonrandom, between participants) actions that were verbally framed as relevant to a particular domain (agent's personal preferences, labels, object functions, or game rules). We found that children's social generalizations about actions were on a continuum: with linguistic conventions (e.g., labels) being the most social, preferences being the most personal, and nonlinguistic conventions (i.e., object functions, game rules) falling somewhere in between. Furthermore, the influence of statistical evidence and cultural variation varied for each domain. These findings highlight how children combine knowledge and evidence to infer social meaning from actions and have implications for rational constructivist accounts of cultural learning. Public Significance StatementWe show that U.S. and Chinese preschoolers (3- to 5-year-olds) combine prior knowledge with evidence to infer whether an action is representative of an individual's idiosyncratic preferences or of norms and conventions of an entire social group. Specifically, preschoolers do not generalize actions framed as preferences of a single individual to other individuals but have strong prior beliefs that actions framed as labels and object functions will generalize across individuals. Notably, preschoolers' generalizations of actions framed as rules of games fall somewhere in the middle and are moderated by cultural background and statistical evidence.