Do children copy an expert or a majority? Examining selective learning in instrumental and normative contexts
Abstract
This study examined whether instrumental and normative learning contexts differentially influence 4- to 7-year-old children’s social learning strategies; specifically, their dispositions to copy an expert versus a majority consensus. Experiment 1 (N = 44) established that children copied a relatively competent “expert” individual over an incompetent individual in both kinds of learning context. In experiment 2 (N = 80) we then tested whether children would copy a competent individual versus a majority, in each of the two different learning contexts. Results showed that individual children differed in strategy, preferring with significant consistency across two different test trials to copy either the competent individual or the majority. This study is the first to show that children prefer to copy more competent individuals when shown competing methods of achieving an instrumental goal (Experiment 1) and provides new evidence that children, at least in our “individualist” culture, may consistently express either a competency or majority bias in learning both instrumental and normative information (Experiment 2). This effect was similar in the instrumental and normative learning contexts we applied.
Citation
Burdett , E R R , Lucas , A J , Buchsbaum , D , McGuigan , N , Wood , L A & Whiten , A 2016 , ' Do children copy an expert or a majority? Examining selective learning in instrumental and normative contexts ' , PLoS One , vol. 11 , no. 10 , e0164698 . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0164698
Publication
PLoS One
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1932-6203Type
Journal article
Description
This work was supported by a John Templeton Foundation grant ID 40128 to AW, and by Economic and Social Research Council Future Research Leaders grant ES/K009540/1 to DB.Collections
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