What Is a Group? : Young Children’s Perceptions of Different Types of Groups and Group Entitativity

To date, developmental research on groups has focused mainly on in-group biases and intergroup relations. However, little is known about children’s general understanding of social groups and their perceptions of different forms of group. In this study, 5- to 6-year-old children were asked to evaluate prototypes of four key types of groups: an intimacy group (friends), a task group (people who are collaborating), a social category (people who look alike), and a loose association (people who coincidently meet at a tram stop). In line with previous work with adults, the vast majority of children perceived the intimacy group, task group, and social category, but not the loose association, to possess entitativity, that is, to be a ‘real group.’ In addition, children evaluated group member properties, social relations, and social obligations differently in each type of group, demonstrating that young children are able to distinguish between different types of in-group relations. The origins of the general group typology used by adults thus appear early in development. These findings contribute to our knowledge about children's intuitive understanding of groups and group members' behavior

Puzzle board with the scene of a child’s room pasted on top.

<p>Nine wooden cubes could be placed into the squares with matching toy pictures on them. In the individual condition, each player played on a separate but identical puzzle board.</p

Box containing the puzzle pieces with a moveable chute at one end.

<p>Players let two small blocks go down the chute to get access to the puzzle pieces.</p

Young Children Understand the Normative Implications of Future-Directed Speech Acts

<div><p>Much recent research has shown that the capacity for mental time travel and temporal reasoning emerges during the preschool years. Nothing is known so far, however, about young children's grasp of the normative dimension of future-directed thought and speech. The present study is the first to show that children from age 4 understand the normative outreach of such future-directed speech acts: subjects at time 1 witnessed a speaker make future-directed speech acts about/towards an actor A, either in imperative mode (“A, do X!”) or as a prediction (“the actor A will do X”). When at time 2 the actor A performed an action that did not match the content of the speech act at time 1, children identified the speaker as the source of a mistake in the prediction case, and the actor as the source of the mistake in the imperative case and leveled criticism accordingly. These findings add to our knowledge about the emergence and development of temporal cognition in revealing an early sensitivity to the normative aspects of future-orientation.</p></div

Schematic overview of the procedure.

<p>chematic overview of the procedure in imperative and the prediction conditions (Study 1 and Study 2).</p

Children’s selection of the more puppet with the positive characteristic.

<p>Children’s selection of the puppet with the positive characteristic as a function of task and familiarization condition. Significantly above-chance choice of the model with the positive characteristic (accurate/strong) is marked by asterisks (*<i>p</i> < .05 and **<i>p</i> < .01, one-sample t-tests). Error bars show standard errors.</p

Selective Cooperation in Early Childhood – How to Choose Models and Partners

<div><p>Cooperation is essential for human society, and children engage in cooperation from early on. It is unclear, however, how children select their partners for cooperation. We know that children choose selectively whom to learn from (e.g. preferring reliable over unreliable models) on a rational basis. The present study investigated whether children (and adults) also choose their cooperative partners selectively and what model characteristics they regard as important for cooperative partners and for informants about novel words. Three- and four-year-old children (N = 64) and adults (N = 14) saw contrasting pairs of models differing either in physical strength or in accuracy (in labeling known objects). Participants then performed different tasks (cooperative problem solving and word learning) requiring the choice of a partner or informant. Both children and adults chose their cooperative partners selectively. Moreover they showed the same pattern of selective model choice, regarding a wide range of model characteristics as important for cooperation (preferring both the strong and the accurate model for a strength-requiring cooperation tasks), but only prior knowledge as important for word learning (preferring the knowledgeable but not the strong model for word learning tasks). Young children’s selective model choice thus reveals an early rational competence: They infer characteristics from past behavior and flexibly consider what characteristics are relevant for certain tasks.</p></div

Adults’ selection of the puppet with the positive characteristic.

<p>Adults’ selection of the puppet with the positive characteristic as a function of task and familiarization condition. Significantly above-chance choice of the model with the positive characteristic (accurate/strong) is marked by asterisks (*<i>p</i> < .05 and **<i>p</i> < .01, one-sample t-tests). +: no parametrical test was applicable due to a lack of variance. Error bars show standard errors.</p