Conformity in the Asch Task as a Function of Age

Walker, Michael; Andrade, Maria Gorete Carreira

doi:10.1080/00224545.1996.9714014

Cited by 106 publications

(101 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…From a young age, children acquire stereotypes about social groups and are motivated to conform to members of their ingroup and of the majority consensus (7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19). Both of these aspects of social cognition rely on an expectation that social group members act alike.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Participants were full-term infants recruited from the greater Boston area (Experiment 1: n = 24, 10 females; mean age, 11 16-7:14). Parents were given travel reimbursement, and participants received a toy or other small reward for participating.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many cultural behaviors, including social gestures and language, are acquired in the first few years, suggesting early biases for adopting the typical behaviors of one's own social group. In the laboratory, preschoolaged children adopt labels for objects endorsed by the majority of informants and conform to consensus perceptual judgments and actions, and they copy the actions of ingroup over outgroup members when group membership is conveyed by native vs. foreign speech (9)(10)(11)(12)(13). Children even show an understanding of groupbased social norms in their reactions to others' behavior, protesting when ingroup members, although not outgroup members, break conventions (14,15).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Preverbal infants expect members of social groups to act alike

Powell

Spelke

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

269

182

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The short ontogenetic time courses of conformity and stereotyping, both evident in the preschool years, point to the possibility that a central component of human social cognition is an early developing expectation that social group members will engage in common behaviors. Across a series of experiments, we show that by 7 months of age preverbal infants differentiate between actions by individuals that are and are not consistent with the actions of their social group members. Infants responded to group-inconsistent actions only in a social context: they failed to distinguish the same behavioral differences when presented with collections of nonsocial agents or inanimate objects. These results suggest that infants expect social group membership and behavior to covary, before extensive intergroup experience or linguistic input. This expectation is consistent with the socially motivated imitation and stereotyping evident in toddlers and preschoolers, and may play a role in the early emergence of one or both of these aspects of social behavior and cognition.social development | infancy

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Preverbal infants expect members of social groups to act alike

Powell

Spelke

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

269

182

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“…In research on epistemic authority, children's deference to the majority can also vary if it is formed by peers instead of adults. There are few studies with preschoolers where the testimony comes from a peer (Haun & Tomasello, 2011;Walker & Andrade, 1996) and almost none of these pertain to testimony about social contexts. Other domains of knowledge in which norms are debatable, such as social conventions, are also an interesting focus of inquiry.…”

Section: Limitations Future Directions and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preschoolers’ Trust in Social Consensus Varies by Context: Conventional vs. Moral Domains

et al. 2016

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Título: La confianza de los niños en el consenso depende del contexto: convencional vs. moral. Resumen: Cuando una mayoría aprueba una exclusión social ¿los niños son fieles a sus opiniones personales o muestran deferencia hacia la mayoría? Teniendo en cuenta investigaciones previas sobre la preferencia de los niños por el testimonio de una mayoría de adultos frente al de un disidente cuando deben aprender palabras, en este trabajo se estudió esta preferencia por el consenso social en dos contextos: exclusión racial entre iguales y aprendizaje de palabras nuevas. El objetivo fue estudiar si la preferencia por la mayoría puede generalizarse a otros contextos. En este trabajo participaron 90 niños de Educación Infantil del grupo étnico mayoritario en España. Los resultados mostraron que los niños se alineaban con la mayoría significativamente menos en el contexto de exclusión que en el de aprendizaje de palabras. Además, rechazaban la opinión del consenso cuando este aprobaba la exclusión de un niño de una actividad grupal, incluso cuando el excluido era de un grupo étnico-racial diferente al propio; por el contrario, los participantes se alineaban con el disidente que condenaba la exclusión, a pesar de que esto implicaba oponerse a la mayoría. Estos resultados proporcionan información relevante sobre el desarrollo del conocimiento social infantil. Palabras clave: desarrollo social; desarrollo cognitivo; juicios morales; consenso social; testimonio.Abstract: Do young children give priority to following personal beliefs over the testimony of a majority group of adults that approves of social exclusion? Following current research on children's preference for nondissenters when learning the names for novel objects, this study investigated children's preference for consensus opinion in two contexts: Interracial social exclusion among peers and novel object labeling. The goal was to examine the generalizability of preference for the opinion of nondissenters in a socially relevant context. This study was conducted with 90 preschool children from the Spanish ethnic majority group. The findings revealed that participants sided with the consensus significantly less often in the social exclusion context than in the novel object labeling context. Moreover, young children did not defer to the opinion of a numerical consensus in the socially meaningful context when a group condoned the exclusion of a peer from a group activity, even when the peer was from an outgroup social category. Instead, participants agreed with a dissenter who claimed that it was not okay to exclude someone, despite the opposite opinion of a numerical majority. These results provide new information regarding children's social knowledge development.

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“…This tendency to adopt peer behavior is evident in a child's compliance with majority influence, their overimitation of behavior, and their succumbing to peer pressure and audience effects. (Berndt, 1979Walker & Andrade, 1996. (Claidière & Whiten, 2012;DiYanni, Corriveau, Kurkul, Nasrini, & Nini, 2015;Haun, van Leeuwen, & Edelson, 2013;Nielsen, Moore, & Mohamedally, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Young children (sometimes) do the right thing even when their peers do not

Engelmann

Herrmann

Rapp

et al. 2016

Cognitive Development

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a b s t r a c tChildren must sometimes decide between conforming to peer behavior and doing what is right. While research shows that children have a strong inclination to act prosocially and to help conspecifics in need, many studies also demonstrate that children tend to adopt peer behavior. In two studies (N = 96), we investigated whether children would conform to an antisocial majority or, whether they would do the right thing even under peer pressure. Results show that if a recipient is in need, 5-year-old children act prosocially in two different contexts even when there is a strong selfish incentive not to. However, once the severity of the recipient's need is reduced, children conform to the antisocial group. The current studies suggest that children's prosocial motivation sometimes wins out against more selfish drives.

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Conformity in the Asch Task as a Function of Age

Cited by 106 publications

References 8 publications

Preverbal infants expect members of social groups to act alike

Preverbal infants expect members of social groups to act alike

Preschoolers’ Trust in Social Consensus Varies by Context: Conventional vs. Moral Domains

Young children (sometimes) do the right thing even when their peers do not

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