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

Abstract

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.

What Makes Children Defy Majorities? The Role of Dissenters in Chinese and Spanish Preschoolers’ Social Judgments

“…According to this view, one would expect Spaniards to be in between these two cultures (U.S. and East Asian), in terms of rate of deference to consensus. However, contrary to this expectation, Guerrero et al (in press) found that Spanish preschoolers did not show any bias toward majority when endorsing new labels; instead, they were as likely to support the majority claim as the dissenter claim. Also, in the study by Enesco et al (in press), the Spanish preschoolers did not defer to the consensus but relied on their beliefs about counting procedures to accept or reject the majority’s assertions.…”

“…Although we cannot directly compare these studies due to the large methodological differences, their general findings revealed that preschoolers were prone to oppose to a ‘morally wrong’ consensus, though the rate of resistance to consensus was higher among the Spanish preschoolers compared to the Americans. However, in the Guerrero et al (in press) study there was always a dissenter whose view coincided with that of the children. We do not know if children maintain the same position without the presence of an “allied” dissenter.…”

“…To date, research on children’s sensitivity to consensus has focused on limited fields of knowledge (vocabulary, objects functions, perceptual judgments, and physical laws) and has been based on two main approaches. Some researchers have studied the influence of consensus or numerical majorities on children’s endorsement of new information, such as the name of a new object (Corriveau et al, 2009; Chen et al, 2011; Cascado et al, 2014; Bernard et al, 2015; Guerrero et al, in press) or the function of unfamiliar objects (Birch et al, 2008). Within this line of research, a common experimental scenario is the conflicting-claims paradigm (Koenig et al, 2004) in which different informants express different views about a particular situation, and the child is asked to decide between the options.…”

“…Thus, an interesting question here is how children assimilate the testimony of others when deciding about familiar and routine social interactions. To our knowledge, only a few studies have addressed preschoolers’ trust in consensus in contexts of moral decision, presenting adults as informants (Guerrero et al, in press, with Spanish participants) or peers as informants (Kim et al, 2016, with American participants). Although we cannot directly compare these studies due to the large methodological differences, their general findings revealed that preschoolers were prone to oppose to a ‘morally wrong’ consensus, though the rate of resistance to consensus was higher among the Spanish preschoolers compared to the Americans.…”

“…In particular, contrary to the conventional assumptions about the East–West cultures, Chan found that the Hong Kong preschoolers selectively relied on their prior beliefs to endorse or reject the information provided by the teacher, while the U.S. preschoolers were more compliant with the teacher’s claims. An additional example of the mixed findings with children from different cultures comes from a series of studies conducted with Spanish preschoolers facing labeling tasks (Guerrero et al, in press) or counting tasks (Enesco et al, in press). It should be mentioned that the Spanish culture, in terms of the cultural approach, is commonly considered as more collectivistic than American culture but still more self-oriented than East Asian cultures (Oyserman et al, 2002).…”