Three-Year-Old Children Detect Social Exclusion in Third-Party Interactions

<p>Humans are motivated to connect with others and are sensitive to social exclusion—intentionally leaving out others. This ability to detect social exclusion is suggested to be evolutionarily adaptive, biologically hardwired, and an important feature of social-cognitive development. Yet it is unclear when children start to independently detect social exclusion. Previous developmental research on social exclusion has focused on children older than 4 years of age, but recent infancy research has suggested younger children may be able to process complex social interactions such as social exclusion. The present study is the first to examine whether 2- to 3-year-old children detect social exclusion and if they prefer to affiliate with individuals who have been excluded over individuals who exclude others. Across 2 experiments, 2- and 3-year-old children (<i>N </i>= 140) viewed exclusive group interactions, in which 2 agents unjustly excluded 1 agent, and children were asked to choose whether they preferred to play with an excluded agent or an exclusive agent. Three-year-old children consistently preferred to play with the excluded agent, whereas 2-year-old children showed no preference. Three-year-old children did not show a preference among agents engaged in inclusive interactions and did not prefer an agent who refused to engage with a group, showing that 3-year-old children distinguish unjust exclusion from other types of interactions. Together, these findings suggest 3-year-old children detect social exclusion and are motivated to affiliate with unjustly excluded agents over those who exclude others, whereas these capacities are still developing in 2-year-old children.</p

Model predictions for Hu et al.'s experiment.

<p>Predicted probability that objects will be selected, plotted against observed proportions, where A was chosen over C 7 of 10 times, B was chosen over C 5 of 5 times, and D was a novel alternative.</p

Model predictions for data in Experiment 1 of Fawcett and Markson [1].

<p>(A) Results for children who showed a preference for 4 interesting toys. (B) Results for children who only showed a preference for 3 of 4 toys. The first character for each pair of bars denotes whether the actors showed a positive (P) reaction to the hidden toys versus a negative (N) reaction. The second character reflects whether the hidden object was said to be in a similar (S) or different (D) category from those seen in training. is the probability of selecting Actor 1's novel object. Error bars represent 95 percent confidence intervals. Cases where children had fewer than 4 chances to play with the training objects are excluded. For (A), there were 17, 17, 11 and 11 participants in the PS, PD, NS, and ND groups, respectively. For (B), there were 26, 26, 32, and 32 participants in the PS, PD, NS, and ND groups, respectively.</p

Model predictions and data for Kushnir, Xu, and Wellman's study [2].

<p>(A) Predicted and observed proportions of children's offers under the default model. (B) Predicted and observed proportions of offers under the assumption that squirrel can decline to choose any object. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.</p

Results of simulations of the unmatched condition from Repacholi and Gopnik [3].

<p>Each line shows the mean across 15 simulations, with standard errors. In both plots, the upper dashed line marks the proportion of 14-month-olds who offered the actor goldfish over broccoli (7 of 8), while the lower dashed line marks the proportion of 18-month-olds who did so (8 of 26), with standard errors. Plot (a) assumes equal prior belief in each model, while (b) assumes that the simpler model has a prior probability of 0.9.</p