Search

Researchers commonly use puppets in development science. Amongst other things, puppets are employed to reduce social hierarchies between child participants and adult experimenters akin to peer interactions. However, it remains controversial whether children treat puppets like real-world social partners in these settings. This study investigated children's imitation of causally irrelevant actions (i.e., over-imitation) performed by puppet, adult, or child models. Seventy-two German children (Age[subscript Range] = 4.6-6.5 years; 36 girls) from urban, socioeconomically diverse backgrounds observed a model retrieving stickers from reward containers. The model performed causally irrelevant actions either in contact with the reward container or not. Children were more likely to over-imitate adults' and peers' actions as compared to puppets' actions. Across models, they copied contact actions more than no-contact actions. While children imitate causally irrelevant actions from puppet models to some extent, their social learning from puppets does not necessarily match their social learning from real-world social agents, such as children or adults.

Interactions with peers are fundamental to socio-cognitive development, but assessing peer interactions in standardized experiments is challenging. Therefore, researchers commonly utilize puppetry to simulate peers. This Registered Report investigated urban German children's (Age[subscript Range] = 3.5-4.5 years; N = 144; 76[male gender symbol]) mind ascriptions and social cognition to test whether they treat puppets like peers, adults, or neither. Children attributed less mind properties to puppets than peers or adults. However, children's social cognition (i.e., normativity, prosociality, and theory of mind) varied little across partners. Puppetry relies on children's ability for pretense, but can provide valid insights into socio-cognitive development. Implications for using puppets as stand-ins for peers in developmental research are discussed.

Creating objects can increase our evaluation of them, even when we compare them to physically identical copies (IKEA effect). Here we evaluate the influence of collaboration on the IKEA effect in two societies--the United Kingdom and India. One hundred twenty-eight 5-to-6-year-old children (48% female, 50% British middle class, 50% Indian middle class) assembled toys in pairs. Half of the children collaborated to assemble a single toy and half assembled their own toy. In both societies, children demonstrated an IKEA effect (?2p = .19), valuing their own creation over an identical copy. This was the case regardless of whether children collaborated or worked independently. In summary, it seems that the IKEA effect is a potent bias that is present in diverse societies and is insensitive to others' contributions in a collaborative environment.

Ownership is a cornerstone of many human societies and can be understood as a cooperative arrangement, where individuals refrain from taking each other's property. Owners can thus trust others to respect their property even in their absence. We investigated this principle in 5- to 7-year-olds (N = 152) from 4 diverse societies. Children participated in a resource task with a peer-partner, where we established ownership by assigning children to one side or the other of an apparatus and by marking resources with colors to help children keep track of them. When retrieving resources in the partner's presence, the majority of children took their own things and respected what belonged to their partner. A proportion of children in all societies also respected ownership in their partner's absence, although the strength of respect varied considerably across societies. We discuss implications for the development of ownership concepts and possible explanations for societal differences.

Sharing of resources is a common feature of human societies. Yet, there is substantial societal variation in children's generosity, and this variation emerges during middle childhood. Societal differences in self-construal orientation may be one factor influencing the ontogeny of generosity. Here, we examine anonymous Dictator Game sharing in 7-and-8-year-olds from two distinct societies: India and the UK (N = 180). We used self-construal manipulations to investigate whether priming self- or other-focused conversations would differentially influence children's generosity. There were no differences in generosity between populations. While a significant reduction in generosity was found following self-priming in both societies, other-priming was ineffectual. The findings are discussed in relation to experimental features and the role of anonymity and reputational concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cheating is harmful to others and society at large. Promises have been shown to increase honesty in children, but their effectiveness has not been compared between different cultural contexts. In a study (2019) with 7‐ to 12‐year‐olds (N = 406, 48% female, middle‐class), voluntary promises reduced cheating in Indian, but not in German children. Children in both contexts cheated, but cheating rates were lower in Germany than in India. In both contexts, cheating decreased with age in the (no‐promise) control condition and was unaffected by age in the promise condition. These findings suggest that there may exist a threshold beyond which cheating cannot be further reduced by promises. This opens new research avenues on how children navigate honesty and promise norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Refugee youth constitute around a third of the refugee population in Germany. We studied the experiences of newly arrived Syrian and Iraqi refugee youth, aged 14 to 18 years (N = 20), in Germany. We utilized semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis to investigate (a) the main challenges faced by youth and (b) their main coping resources to deal with these challenges. We grouped challenges into three levels: the individual level, the immediate social level, and the broader societal level. The most frequently mentioned challenges in our sample related to psychological wellbeing, school, friendship, accommodation, and discrimination. Youth reported relying on social support (friends, family, social services) and on themselves (through avoidance, persistence, activity seeking, active engagement) to cope with their challenges. Our findings provide insights into refugee youth's experiences in Germany, encompassing the acculturative, developmental, and generational aspects of their lives and demonstrating their coping and resilience. We discuss our results in relation to the literature on refugee youth in high-income countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactions with peers are fundamental to socio‐cognitive development, but assessing peer interactions in standardized experiments is challenging. Therefore, researchers commonly utilize puppetry to simulate peers. This Registered Report investigated urban German children's (AgeRange = 3.5–4.5 years; N = 144; 76♀) mind ascriptions and social cognition to test whether they treat puppets like peers, adults, or neither. Children attributed less mind properties to puppets than peers or adults. However, children's social cognition (i.e., normativity, prosociality, and theory of mind) varied little across partners. Puppetry relies on children's ability for pretense, but can provide valid insights into socio‐cognitive development. Implications for using puppets as stand‐ins for peers in developmental research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People often assign ownership to the person who has invested labor into making an object (labor rule). However, labor usually improves objects and increases their value, and it has not been investigated whether these considerations underlie people's use of the labor rule. We presented participants with third-party ownership conflicts between an owner of materials and an artist who used the materials for some artwork. Experiment 1 revealed that participants were more likely to transfer ownership to the artist for low-value materials than for high-value materials, and Experiment 2 showed that this effect was further moderated by the amount of effort the artist had invested. A third experiment confirmed that participants transferred ownership more often if the artist's labor had increased the value of the materials than when it had added no value. These findings suggest that considerations for value underlie ownership transfers following the investment of labor.

Researchers commonly use puppets in development science. Amongst other things, puppets are employed to reduce social hierarchies between child participants and adult experimenters akin to peer interactions. However, it remains controversial whether children treat puppets like real‐world social partners in these settings. This study investigated children's imitation of causally irrelevant actions (i.e., over‐imitation) performed by puppet, adult, or child models. Seventy‐two German children (AgeRange = 4.6–6.5 years; 36 girls) from urban, socioeconomically diverse backgrounds observed a model retrieving stickers from reward containers. The model performed causally irrelevant actions either in contact with the reward container or not. Children were more likely to over‐imitate adults' and peers' actions as compared to puppets' actions. Across models, they copied contact actions more than no‐contact actions. While children imitate causally irrelevant actions from puppet models to some extent, their social learning from puppets does not necessarily match their social learning from real‐world social agents, such as children or adults. Research Highlights: We examined children's over‐imitation from adult, child, and puppet models to validate puppetry as an approach to simulate non‐hierarchical interactions.Children imitated adults and child models at slightly higher rates than puppets.This effect was present regardless of whether the irrelevant actions involved physical contact to the reward container or not.In our study children's social learning from puppets does not match their social learning from human models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is extensive research on children's intergroup attitudes, but their perceptions of refugee children have rarely been studied. We conducted a study with 5- and 6-year-old children (N = 60) in Germany following the arrival of unprecedented large numbers of refugees in 2015 and 2016. Children completed a set of three tasks that measured their perceptions of refugee children (minority group) and German children (majority group): a draw-a-typical-child task (including questions about whether participants wanted to interact with the depicted child), an intergroup attitude task, and a liking task. Results indicate that participants drew similar pictures of and had similar intentions to interact with refugee children and German children. There was mixed evidence for group favouritism: while participants showed similar explicit attitudes towards German and refugee peers, they indicated more liking of German peers. Moreover, children viewed refugee children as a less variable (more homogeneous) group than German children. Opportunities for intergroup contact with refugee peers (i.e., whether participants attended kindergartens with or without refugee children) had no discernible effect on any of the measures. Our findings provide a snapshot of children's perceptions of refugees in a unique historical context and contribute to research on the development of intergroup attitudes in real-world settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can Boyer's model of ownership psychology provide useful insights for comparative research? I apply his model to argue that we currently have evidence for possession psychology (based on competitive resource acquisition) in non-human primates, but not for ownership psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many societal challenges are threshold dilemmas requiring people to cooperate to reach a threshold before group benefits can be reaped. Yet receiving feedback about others’ outcomes relative to one’s own (relative feedback) can undermine cooperation by focusing group members’ attention on outperforming each other. We investigated the impact of relative feedback compared to individual feedback (only seeing one’s own outcome) on cooperation in children from Germany and India (6- to 10-year-olds, N = 240). Using a threshold public-goods game with real water as a resource, we show that, although feedback had an effect, most groups sustained cooperation at high levels in both feedback conditions until the end of the game. Analyses of children’s communication (14,374 codable utterances) revealed more references to social comparisons and more verbal efforts to coordinate in the relative-feedback condition. Thresholds can mitigate the most adverse effects of social comparisons by focusing attention on a common goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we show that bonobos and capuchin monkeys can learn to search in the middle of a landmark configuration in a small-scale space. Five bonobos (Pan paniscus) and 2 capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) were tested in a series of experiments with the expansion test paradigm. The primates were trained to search in the middle of a 4- or 2-landmark configuration, and were then tested with the same configuration expanded. Neither species searched in the middle of the expanded 4-landmark configuration. When presented with a 2-landmark configuration and a constant or variable inter-landmark training distance, the subjects sometimes searched preferentially in the middle of the expanded configuration. We discuss 2 alternative explanations of the results: extracting a middle rule or averaging between different goal-landmark vectors. In any case, compared to adult humans, primates appear highly constrained in their abilities to search in the middle of a configuration of detached landmarks. We discuss some of the factors that may influence the primates' behavior in this task. Keywords: bonobos, capuchins, landmark configuration, middle rule, vector averaging DOI: 10.1037/a0015970

Individuals in all societies conform to their cultural group's conventional norms, from how to dress on certain occasions to how to play certain games. It is an open question, however, whether individuals in all societies actively enforce the group's conventional norms when others break them. We investigated third-party enforcement of conventional norms in 5- to 8-y-old children (n = 376) from eight diverse small-scale and large-scale societies. Children learned the rules for playing a new sorting game and then, observed a peer who was apparently breaking them. Across societies, observer children intervened frequently to correct their misguided peer (i.e., more frequently than when the peer was following the rules). However, both the magnitude and the style of interventions varied across societies. Detailed analyses of children's interactions revealed societal differences in children's verbal protest styles as well as in their use of actions, gestures, and nonverbal expressions to intervene. Observers' interventions predicted whether their peer adopted the observer's sorting rule. Enforcement of conventional norms appears to be an early emerging human universal that comes to be expressed in culturally variable ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People frequently engage in dishonest behavior at a cost to others, and it is therefore beneficial to study interventions promoting honest behavior. We implemented a novel intervention that gave participants a choice to promise to be truthful or not to promise. To measure cheating behavior, we developed a novel variant of the mind game—the dice‐box game—as well as a child‐friendly sender–receiver game. Across three studies with adolescents aged 10 to 14 years (N = 640) from schools in India, we found that promises systematically lowered cheating rates compared with no‐promise control conditions. Adolescents who sent truthful messages in the sender–receiver game cheated less in the dice‐box game and promises reduced cheating in both tasks (Study 1). Promises in the dice‐box game remained effective when negative externalities (Study 2) or incentives for competition (Study 3) were added. A joint analysis of data from all three studies revealed demographic variables that influenced cheating. Our findings confirm that promises have a strong, binding effect on behavior and can be an effective intervention to reduce cheating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social learning strategies are key for making adaptive decisions, but their ontogeny remains poorly understood. We investigate how social information use depends on its source (adults vs. peer), and how it is shaped by household composition (extended vs. nuclear), a factor known to modulate social development. Using a simple estimation task, we show that social information strongly impacts the behaviour of adolescents aged 11 to 15 years (N = 256), especially when its source is an adult. However, social information use does not depend on household composition: the relative impact of adults and peers was similar in adolescents from both household types. Furthermore, adolescents were found to directly copy others' estimates surprisingly frequently. This study provides novel insights into adolescents' social information use and contributes to understanding the ontogeny of social learning strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been extensive research into the development of selective trust in testimony, but little is known about the development of selective trust in promises. The present research investigates children's (N = 264) selective trust in others' promises to help. In Study 1, 6-year-olds selectively trusted speakers who had previously kept a promise. In Study 2, 5-year-olds displayed selective trust for speakers who had previously kept a prosocial promise (promise to help). In Study 3, 5-year-olds trusted a speaker, who kept a prosocial promise, over a helper. These data suggest that from the age of 5 children show selective trust in others' promises using prosociality, promise keeping, or both to inform their judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ownership is a cornerstone of many human societies and can be understood as a cooperative arrangement, where individuals refrain from taking each other's property. Owners can thus trust others to respect their property even in their absence. We investigated this principle in 5- to 7-year-olds (N = 152) from 4 diverse societies. Children participated in a resource task with a peer-partner, where we established ownership by assigning children to one side or the other of an apparatus and by marking resources with colors to help children keep track of them. When retrieving resources in the partner's presence, the majority of children took their own things and respected what belonged to their partner. A proportion of children in all societies also respected ownership in their partner's absence, although the strength of respect varied considerably across societies. We discuss implications for the development of ownership concepts and possible explanations for societal differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children often treat robots as social agents after they have witnessed interactions that can be interpreted as social. We studied in three experiments whether four-year-olds from three cultures (China, Japan, UK) and adults from two cultures (Japan, UK) will attribute ownership of objects to a robot that engages in social gaze with a human. Participants watched videos of robothuman interactions, in which objects were possessed or new objects were created. Children and adults applied the same ownership rules to humans and robots - irrespective of whether the robot engaged in social gaze or not. However, there was cultural variation in the types of ownership rules used. In Experiment 3, we removed further social cues, finding that just showing a pair of self-propelled robot-arms elicited ownership attributions. The role of social gaze in social attributions to robots and cross-cultural differences in ownership understanding are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People often assign ownership to the person who has invested labor into making an object (labor rule). However, labor usually improves objects and increases their value, and it has not been investigated whether these considerations underlie people's use of the labor rule. We presented participants with third-party ownership conflicts between an owner of materials and an artist who used the materials for some artwork. Experiment 1 revealed that participants were more likely to transfer ownership to the artist for low-value materials than for high-value materials, and Experiment 2 showed that this effect was further moderated by the amount of effort the artist had invested. A third experiment confirmed that participants transferred ownership more often if the artist's labor had increased the value of the materials than when it had added no value. These findings suggest that considerations for value underlie ownership transfers following the investment of labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Merit is a key principle of fairness: rewards should be distributed according to how much someone contributed to a task. Previous research suggests that children have an early ability to take merit into account in third-party situations but that merit-based sharing in first-party contexts does not emerge until school-age. Here we provide evidence that three- and five-year-old children already use merit to share resources with others, even when sharing is costly for the child. In Study 1, a child and a puppet-partner collected coins that were later exchanged for rewards. We varied the work-contribution of both partners by manipulating how many coins each partner collected. Children kept fewer stickers in trials in which they had contributed less than in trials in which they had contributed more than the partner, showing that they took merit into account. Few children, however, gave away more than half of the stickers when the partner had worked more. Study 2 confirmed that children related their own work-contribution to their partner's, rather than simply focusing on their own contribution. Taken together, these studies show that merit-based sharing is apparent in young children; however it remains constrained by a self-serving bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social network analysis offers new tools to study the social structure of primate groups. We used social network analysis to investigate the cohesiveness of a grooming network in a captive chimpanzee group ( N = 17) and the role that individuals may play in it. Using data from a year-long observation, we constructed an unweighted social network of preferred grooming interactions by retaining only those dyads that groomed above the group mean. This choice of criterion was validated by the finding that the properties of the unweighted network correlated with the properties of a weighted network (i.e. a network representing the frequency of grooming interactions) constructed from the same data. To investigate group cohesion, we tested the resilience of the unweighted grooming network to the removal of central individuals (i.e. individuals with high betweenness centrality). The network fragmented more after the removal of individuals with high betweenness centrality than after the removal of random individuals. Central individuals played a pivotal role in maintaining the network's cohesiveness, and we suggest that this may be a typical property of affiliative networks like grooming networks. We found that the grooming network correlated with kinship and age, and that individuals with higher social status occupied more central positions in the network. Overall, the grooming network showed a heterogeneous structure, yet did not exhibit scale-free properties similar to many other primate networks. We discuss our results in light of recent findings on animal social networks and chimpanzee grooming. Am. J. Primatol. 73:758-767, 2011. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to and control of resources is a major source of costly conflicts. Animals, under some conditions, respect what others control and use (i.e. possession). Humans not only respect possession of resources, they also respect ownership. Ownership can be viewed as a cooperative arrangement, where individuals inhibit their tendency to take others' property on the condition that those others will do the same. We investigated to what degree great apes follow this principle, as compared to human children. We conducted two experiments, in which dyads of individuals could access the same food resources. The main test of respect for ownership was whether individuals would refrain from taking their partner's resources even when the partner could not immediately access and control them. Captive apes (N = 14 dyads) failed to respect their partner's claim on food resources and frequently monopolized the resources when given the opportunity. Human children (N = 14 dyads), tested with a similar apparatus and procedure, respected their partner's claim and made spontaneous verbal references to ownership. Such respect for the property of others highlights the uniquely cooperative nature of human ownership arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creating objects can increase our evaluation of them, even when we compare them to physically identical copies (IKEA effect). Here we evaluate the influence of collaboration on the IKEA effect in two societies--the United Kingdom and India. One hundred twenty-eight 5-to-6-year-old children (48% female, 50% British middle class, 50% Indian middle class) assembled toys in pairs. Half of the children collaborated to assemble a single toy and half assembled their own toy. In both societies, children demonstrated an IKEA effect (ηp² = .19), valuing their own creation over an identical copy. This was the case regardless of whether children collaborated or worked independently. In summary, it seems that the IKEA effect is a potent bias that is present in diverse societies and is insensitive to others' contributions in a collaborative environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children all over the world learn language, yet the contexts in which they do so vary substantially. This variation needs to be systematically quantified to build robust and generalizable theories of language acquisition. We compared communicative interactions between parents and their 2-year-old children (N = 99 families) during mealtime across five cultural settings (Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Germany, and Japan) and coded the amount of talk and gestures as well as their conversational embedding (interlocutors, function, and themes). We found a comparable pattern of communicative interactions across cultural settings, which were modified in ways that are consistent with local norms and values. These results suggest that children encounter similarly structured communicative environments across diverse cultural contexts and will inform theories of language learning. Public Significance Statement: Cultural norms and beliefs structure social interactions and communication. As a consequence, children learn language under very different circumstances. We studied communicative interactions between parents and their children in five diverse cultural contexts. We found a common, child-centered pattern of communication that was modified in line with local norms and values. This suggests that children can rely on similar information sources and learning processes across cultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]