Social sampling: Children track social choices to reason about status hierarchies.

Abstract

for discussion and assistance with recruitment and coding. We thank Stephen Parry for advice on the statistical analyses reported in this paper. We thank Judy and Debby from Etsy for their assistance with materials.

Emerging complexity in children's conceptualization of the wealthy and the poor

“…Critically, despite their highly positive evaluations of the wealthy, young children do not reliably associate the wealthy with greater social power, implying that they may not think the exercise of social power is itself positive, a possibility that we see as worthy of further investigation. This possibility somewhat aligns with a recent finding that children do not think “leaders” are “helpers” (see Heck et al., 2020), and that children do not reliably connect other social categories such as age and gender with power (Gülgöz, 2015). We note that in some of our power dimensions the high‐power character might be seen as mean, especially in the permission scenarios (e.g., not giving permission), but in other scenarios this does not appear to be the case (e.g., both parties wanted different outcomes and one party achieved the goal).…”

The social network: How people infer relationships from mutual connections.

“…If so, this would suggest people infer relationships not only from domain-specific cues (e.g., shared preferences), but also using domain-general numerical knowledge and statistical inferences. This possibility is broadly consistent with recent work showing that attention to proportional and statistical information underlies many social judgments, including inferences about preferences (e.g., Heck et al, 2021; Kushnir et al, 2010), group membership (e.g., Gershman et al, 2017; Gershman & Cikara, 2020), and emotions (e.g., Asaba et al, 2019; Doan et al, 2020).…”

“…The final two experiments examined children. We expected they might use social network information to infer relationships because children are sensitive to many other cues indicating relationships (e.g., Liberman & Shaw, 2019; for a review, see Afshordi & Liberman, 2021) and because young children are sensitive to proportional and statistical information (e.g., Diesendruck et al, 2015; Heck et al, 2021; Kushnir et al, 2010; Vélez & Gweon, 2020). 1 Rather than asking about friendships, though, children were told which people in the group knew each target, and were then asked whether the targets knew one another.…”

Imagination and social cognition in childhood

“…The final consequence of complexity is the potential for making mistakes. Attribution biases in children (Over et al, 2018; Rizzo et al, 2021), like attribution errors in adults, can result from only thinking about the most likely or available alternatives to inform interpretation (Heck et al, 2021). What counts as likely or available will depend on individual experience, and on causal principles that are most enforced by the surrounding culture.…”