A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Social Motivation and Social Cognition in Young Children

The evolutionary success of our species is bound to our sociality—the tendency to engage in and benefit from social interactions. On a conceptual level, this sociality has been parsed into two facets, namely the proclivity to like and seek social interactions (social motivation) as well as the cognitive abilities needed to coordinate with others socially (social cognition). While numerous studies have assessed social motivation and social cognition in young children, our current understanding of both facets is still far from conclusive. First, the exact ontogeny of social motivation and cognition remains largely unclear. Second, the degree to which either facet of sociality is shaped by cultural input remains poorly understood. Finally, interindividual variation in social motivation and cognition has yet to be examined, without which we can neither understand the construct validity of either facet, nor their potential interplay. In this dissertation, I present three studies addressing these issues by focusing on developmental, cross-cultural, and interindividual variation in three phenomena previously linked to sociality: Overimitation and collaboration as indicators of social motivation, as well as Theory of Mind as a proxy for social cognition. In the first study I assessed whether children’s overimitation would be shaped by age, culture, and the social presence of an adult model. I found that children across three diverse populations showed more overimitation with age and selectively in the presence of the model. I also documented cross-cultural variation in children’s overimitation. On an individual level, children’s overimitation did not predict their tendency to reengage a co-player in a collaborative activity. In study 2, I found children’s overimitation to vary systematically between two populations utilizing a procedure with reduced cognitive task demands. Here, age did not predict children’s overimitation and variation across populations was only observed in how much, but not whether, children would overimitate. In study 3, I documented systematic variation in children’s social motivation for collaboration as well as their Theory of Mind across three populations and across the age range tested. On an individual level, indicators of social motivation were ontogenetically linked and predicted children’s Theory of Mind. In the general discussion, I propose an integrative model of social motivation and cognition to embed and expand the current findings. Accordingly, the interplay of socialization goals and practices, social motivation, and social cognition builds the foundation for children’s social learning within social interactions

Explaining variation in parents' and their children's stress during COVID-19 lockdowns

The coronavirus pandemic poses a substantial threat to people across the globe. In the first half of 2020, governments limited the spread of virus by imposing diverse regulations. These regulations had a particular impact on families as parents had to manage their occupational situation and childcare in parallel. Here, we examine a variation in parents' and children's stress during the lockdowns in the first half of 2020 and detect the correlates of families' stress. Between April and June 2020, we conducted an explorative online survey among n = 422 parents of 3- to 10-year-old children residing in 17 countries. Most participants came from Germany (n = 274), Iran (n = 70), UK (n = 23), and USA (n = 23). Parents estimated their own stress, the stress of their own children, and various information on potential correlates (e.g., accommodation, family constellation, education, community size, playtime for children, contact with peers, media consumption, and physical activity). Parents also stated personal values regarding openness to change, self-transcendence, self-enhancement, and conservation. The results indicate a substantial variation in the stress levels of families and their diverse reactions to regulations. Media consumption by children commonly increased in comparison to the time before the pandemic. Parents raising both pre-school- and school-aged children were at a particular risk of experiencing stress in response to regulations. Estimated stress and reactions varied with the age of children and the personal values of parents, suggesting that such variables need to be considered when implementing and evaluating regulations and supporting young families in the current and future pandemi

Why should I trust you?: Investigating young children’s spontaneous mistrust in potential deceivers

Children must learn not to trust everyone to avoid being taken advantage of. In the current study, 5- and 7-year-old children were paired with a partner whose incentives were either congruent (cooperative condition) or conflicting (competitive condition) with theirs. Children of both ages were more likely to mistrust information spontaneously provided by the competitive than the cooperative partner, showing a capacity for detecting contextual effects on incentives. However, a high proportion of children, even at age 7, initially trusted the competitive partner. After being misled once, almost all children mistrusted the partner on a second trial irrespective of the partner’s incentives. These results demonstrate that while even school age children are mostly trusting, they are only beginning to spontaneously consider other’s incentives when interpreting the truthfulness of their utterances. However, after receiving false information only once they immediately switch to an untrusting attitude

Why should I trust you?: Investigating young children’s spontaneous mistrust in potential deceivers

Children must learn not to trust everyone to avoid being taken advantage of. In the current study, 5- and 7-year-old children were paired with a partner whose incentives were either congruent (cooperative condition) or conflicting (competitive condition) with theirs. Children of both ages were more likely to mistrust information spontaneously provided by the competitive than the cooperative partner, showing a capacity for detecting contextual effects on incentives. However, a high proportion of children, even at age 7, initially trusted the competitive partner. After being misled once, almost all children mistrusted the partner on a second trial irrespective of the partner’s incentives. These results demonstrate that while even school age children are mostly trusting, they are only beginning to spontaneously consider other’s incentives when interpreting the truthfulness of their utterances. However, after receiving false information only once they immediately switch to an untrusting attitude

Why should I trust you?: Investigating young children’s spontaneous mistrust in potential deceivers

Children must learn not to trust everyone to avoid being taken advantage of. In the current study, 5- and 7-year-old children were paired with a partner whose incentives were either congruent (cooperative condition) or conflicting (competitive condition) with theirs. Children of both ages were more likely to mistrust information spontaneously provided by the competitive than the cooperative partner, showing a capacity for detecting contextual effects on incentives. However, a high proportion of children, even at age 7, initially trusted the competitive partner. After being misled once, almost all children mistrusted the partner on a second trial irrespective of the partner’s incentives. These results demonstrate that while even school age children are mostly trusting, they are only beginning to spontaneously consider other’s incentives when interpreting the truthfulness of their utterances. However, after receiving false information only once they immediately switch to an untrusting attitude

Does Fostering Children's Empathy Increase Their Prosocial Lie-Telling Behaviors?

Starting from around 3 years of age, children tell prosocial lies for politeness purposes (Talwar, Murphy, & Lee, 2007). To understand the motivation underlying this behavior, Warneken and Orlins (2015) assessed whether children would lie prosocially out of habitual politeness, or whether they would do so in order to improve the mood of their social partners. Children told prosocial lies selectively toward a sad, as compared to a neutral partner, with this effect being more pronounced with age. This finding has been interpreted such that children tell prosocial lies to make others feel better, with older children showing a stronger effect because of their greater sensitivity toward the artist’s emotional state (Warneken & Orlins, 2015; Ceci, Burd, & Helm, 2015). To test the causal validity of this claim, the current study aims at investigating the potential role of empathy in actuating young children’s prosocial lie-telling. Empathy has long been discussed as a developmental driver of prosocial behavior more generally (Eisenberg & Miller, 1987), as it has been found to motivate individuals to help others in distress (McDonald & Messinger, 2011). While some empirical studies have linked children's empathy and their prosociality (i.e., Roberts & Strayer, 1996; Knafo, Zahn-Waxler, Van Hulle, Robinson, & Rhee, 2008), a causal link between both phenomena has to this date only been documented among adults (Xu, Chen, & Li 2019; Lupoli et al., 2017) To do so, we aim to test whether fostering young children's empathy (i.e., by modelling it within a short-time intervention) affects children’s tendency to tell prosocial lies to third parties. Doing so, we introduce a novel interactive paradigm for assessing and inducing young children’s empathy and link children's performance to established proxies for children's prosocial lie-telling behaviors (Warneken & Orlins, 2015)

Cultural variation in young children's social motivation for peer collaboration and its relation to the ontogeny of Theory of Mind.

Children seek and like to engage in collaborative activities with their peers. This social motivation is hypothesized to facilitate their emerging social-cognitive skills and vice versa. Current evidence on the ontogeny of social motivation and its' links to social cognition, however, is subject to a sampling bias toward participants from urban Western populations. Here, we show both cross-cultural variation and homogeneity in three- to eight-year-old children's expressed positive emotions during and explicit preferences for peer collaboration across three diverse populations (urban German, rural Hai||om/Namibia, rural Ovambo/Namibia; n = 240). Children expressed more positive emotions during collaboration as compared to individual activity, but the extent varied across populations. Children's preferences for collaboration differed markedly between populations and across ages: While German children across all ages sought collaboration, Hai||om children preferred to act individually throughout childhood. Ovambo children preferred individual play increasingly with age. Across populations, positive emotions expressed selectively during collaboration, predicted children's social-cognitive skills. These findings provide evidence that culture shapes young children's social motivation for dyadic peer collaboration. At the same time, the positive relation of social motivation and social cognition in early ontogeny appears cross-culturally constant

Spreading the game – An experimental study of the link between overimitation and the accumulation of conventional information in young children

In our study, we want to investigate the role of overimitation in children's transmission of normative information, i.e. game rules. Therefore, we want to run two Overimitation tasks in children (5y). Based on their performance, children will then be assigned to one of two groups: Non-overimitators (N-OI's) and Overimitators (OI's). In a diffusion-chain-paradigm, these children will then receive a video instruction in which a same-sex adult explains one of two games. Following this, children will be given the chance to play the game themselves before explaining the game to another child (again, via video message). Following this first-generation transmission chain, video vignettes will then be shown to children's ingroup peers. Again, children will have the chance to play the game themselves before engaging in another video instruction for a third party (second-generation transmission chain). As a dependent variable, we want to code the degree to which children faithfully copy the game as instructed, how accurate they transmit the learned game to the next generation and whether they add/innovate novel objects and actions into the game. Further, children's utterances while explaining the game to a third party will be coded with regards to normative speech. We predict to find higher levels of high-fidelity transmission of game rules among OI, as compared to N-OI. Such differences should appear in children's own play, as well as in their game instructions/transmission. We further expect the group differences in adopting the original game rules to be more pronounced among the second-generation as compared to the first-generation. We further predict N-OI-children to show higher levels of innovation across the course of the study than their OI-counterparts