How young children use manifest emotions and dominance cues to understand social rules: a registered report.

Given the complexity of human social life, it is astonishing to observe how quickly children adapt to their social environment. To be accepted by the other members, it is crucial to understand and follow the rules and norms shared by the group. How and from whom do young children learn these social rules? In the experiments, based on the crucial role of affective social learning and dominance hierarchies in simple rule understanding, we showed 15-to-23-month-olds and 3-to-5-year-old children videos where the agents' body size and affective cues were manipulated. In the dominant rule-maker condition, when a smaller protagonist puts an object in one location, a bigger agent reacts with a positive reaction; on the contrary, when the smaller protagonist puts an object in another location, the bigger agent displays a negative reaction. In the subordinate rule-maker condition, the roles are shifted but the agents differ. Toddlers expect the protagonist to follow the rules (based on anticipatory looks), independent of the dominant status of the rule-making agent. Three-to-five-year-old pre-schoolers overall perform at the chance level but expect the protagonist to disobey a rule in the first trial, and obey the rule in the second trial if the rule-maker is dominant.

Wired for society? From ego-logy to eco-logy.

Somewhat questioning Elizabeth Spelke's attempt to account for infants' social knowledge, our commentary argues that social cognition might be divided into several specialized systems. In addition to the core system dedicated to the intersubjective dimension of close relationships, infants could be prewired to process social relationships, such as dominance, characterized by their impersonal, normative dimension.

Affective Social Learning serves as a quick and flexible complement to TTOM.

Although we applaud the general aims of the target article, we argue that Affective Social Learning completes TTOM by pointing out how emotions can provide another route to acquiring culture, a route which may be quicker, more flexible, and even closer to an axiological definition of culture (less about what is, and more about what should be) than TTOM itself.

Group Membership Influences More Social Identification Than Social Learning or Overimitation in Children.

Group membership is a strong driver of everyday life in humans, influencing similarity judgments, trust choices, and learning processes. However, its ontogenetic development remains to be understood. This study investigated how group membership, age, sex, and identification with a team influenced 39- to 60-month-old children (N = 94) in a series of similarity, trust, and learning tasks. Group membership had the most influence on similarity and trust tasks, strongly biasing choices toward in-groups. In contrast, prior experience and identification with the team were the most important factors in the learning tasks. Finally, overimitation occurred most when the children's team, but not the opposite, displayed meaningless actions. Future work must investigate how these cognitive abilities combine during development to facilitate cultural processes.

Endogenous oxytocin predicts helping and conversation as a function of group membership.

Humans cooperate with unrelated individuals to an extent that far outstrips any other species. We also display extreme variation in decisions about whether to cooperate or not, and the mechanisms driving this variation remain an open question across the behavioural sciences. One candidate mechanism underlying this variation in cooperation is the evolutionary ancient neurohormone oxytocin (OT). As current research focuses on artificial administration of OT in asocial tasks, little is known about how the hormone in its naturally occurring state actually impacts behaviour in social interactions. Using a new optimal foraging paradigm, the 'egg hunt', we assessed the association of endogenous OT with helping behaviour and conversation. We manipulated players' group membership relative to each other prior to an egg hunt, during which they had repeated opportunities to spontaneously help each other. Results show that endogenous baseline OT predicted helping and conversation type, but crucially as a function of group membership. Higher baseline OT predicted increased helping but only between in-group players, as well as decreased discussion about individuals' goals between in-group players but conversely more of such discussion between out-group players. Subsequently, behaviour but not conversation during the hunt predicted change in OT, in that out-group members who did not help showed a decrease in OT from baseline levels. In sum, endogenous OT predicts helping behaviour and conversation, importantly as a function of group membership, and this effect occurs in parallel to uniquely human cognitive processes.

The language of cooperation: shared intentionality drives variation in helping as a function of group membership.

While we know that the degree to which humans are able to cooperate is unrivalled by other species, the variation humans actually display in their cooperative behaviour has yet to be fully explained. This may be because research based on experimental game-theoretical studies neglects fundamental aspects of human sociality and psychology, namely social interaction and language. Using a new optimal foraging game loosely modelled on the prisoner's dilemma, the egg hunt, we categorized players as either in-group or out-group to each other and studied their spontaneous language usage while they made interactive, potentially cooperative decisions. Both shared group membership and the possibility to talk led to increased cooperation and overall success in the hunt. Notably, analysis of players' conversations showed that in-group members engaged more in shared intentionality, the human ability to both mentally represent and then adopt another's goal, whereas out-group members discussed individual goals more. Females also helped more and displayed more shared intentionality in discussions than males. Crucially, we show that shared intentionality was the mechanism driving the increase in helping between in-group players over out-group players at a cost to themselves. By studying spontaneous language during social interactions and isolating shared intentionality as the mechanism underlying successful cooperation, the current results point to a probable psychological source of the variation in cooperation humans display.

Self-deception as affective coping. An empirical perspective on philosophical issues.

In the philosophical literature, self-deception is mainly approached through the analysis of paradoxes. Yet, it is agreed that self-deception is motivated by protection from distress. In this paper, we argue, with the help of findings from cognitive neuroscience and psychology, that self-deception is a type of affective coping. First, we criticize the main solutions to the paradoxes of self-deception. We then present a new approach to self-deception. Self-deception, we argue, involves three appraisals of the distressing evidence: (a) appraisal of the strength of evidence as uncertain, (b) low coping potential and (c) negative anticipation along the lines of Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis. At the same time, desire impacts the treatment of flattering evidence via dopamine. Our main proposal is that self-deception involves emotional mechanisms provoking a preference for immediate reward despite possible long-term negative repercussions. In the last part, we use this emotional model to revisit the philosophical paradoxes.

Wishful thinking in preschoolers.

The current experiment sought to demonstrate the presence of wishful thinking--when wishes influence beliefs--in young children. A sample of 77 preschoolers needed to predict, eight times in a row, which of two plastic eggs, one containing one toy and the other containing three toys, would be drawn by a blinded experimenter. On the four trials in which the children could not keep the content of the egg drawn, they were equally likely to predict that either egg would be drawn. By contrast, on the four trials in which the children got to keep the content of the egg, they were more likely to predict that the egg with three toys would be drawn. Any effort the children exerted would be the same across conditions, so that this demonstration of wishful thinking cannot be accounted for by an effort heuristic. One group of children--a subgroup of the 5-year-olds--did not engage in wishful thinking. Children from this subgroup instead used the representativeness heuristic to guide their answers. This result suggests that having an explicit representation of the outcome inhibits children from engaging in wishful thinking in the same way as explicit representations constrain the operation of motivated reasoning in adults.

Visual access trumps gender in 3- and 4-year-old children's endorsement of testimony.

Several studies have investigated how preschoolers weigh social cues against epistemic cues when taking testimony into account. For instance, one study showed that 4- and 5-year-olds preferred to endorse the testimony of an informant who had the same gender as the children; by contrast, when the gender cue conflicted with an epistemic cue--past reliability--the latter trumped the former. None of the previous studies, however, has shown that 3-year-olds can prioritize an epistemic cue over a social cue. In Experiment 1, we offer the first demonstration that 3-year-olds favor testimony from a same-gender informant in the absence of other cues. In Experiments 2 and 3, an epistemic cue-visual access--was introduced. In those experiments, 3- and 4-year-olds endorsed the testimony of the informant with visual access regardless of whether it was a same-gender informant (Experiment 3) or a different-gender informant (Experiment 2). These results demonstrate that 3-year-olds are able to give more weight to an epistemic cue than to a social cue when evaluating testimony.

The boss is always right: Preschoolers endorse the testimony of a dominant over that of a subordinate.

Recent research has shown that young children rely on social cues to evaluate testimony. For instance, they prefer to endorse testimony provided by a consensual group than by a single dissenter. Given that dominance is pervasive in children's social environment, it can be hypothesized that children also use dominance relations in their selection of testimony. To test this hypothesis, a dominance asymmetry was induced between two characters either by having one repeatedly win in physical contests (physical power; Experiment 1) or by having one repeatedly impose her goals on the other (decisional power; Experiment 2). In two subsequent testimony tasks, 3- to 5-year-old children significantly tended to endorse the testimony of the dominant over that of the subordinate. These results suggest that preschoolers take dominance into account when evaluating testimony. In conclusion, we discuss two potential explanations for these findings.

Four- to Six-Year-Old Children's Sensitivity to Reliability Versus Consensus in the Endorsement of Object Labels.

Recent studies have demonstrated that young children use past reliability and consensus to endorse object labels. Until now, no study has investigated how children weigh these two cues when they are in conflict. The two experiments reported here were designed to explore whether any initial preference for information provided by a consensual group would be influenced by the group's subsequent unreliability. The results show that 4- and 5-year-old children were more likely to endorse labels provided by an unreliable but consensual group than the labels provided by a reliable dissenter. Six-year-olds displayed the reverse pattern. The article concludes by discussing the methodological implications of the two experiments and the developmental trajectory regarding the way children weigh consensuality versus reliability.

Children weigh the number of informants and perceptual uncertainty when identifying objects.

The aim of this study was to evaluate how 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 150) identify an object when they are confronted with conflicting evidence, notably when the available perceptual evidence is contradicted by the testimony of either a lone informant or a three-informant consensus. Results showed that (a) 5-year-olds were more likely than 3- or 4-year-olds to rely on the perceptual evidence, ignoring claims made by the informants; (b) the three-informant consensus had more impact than a single informant for all age groups; and (c) children were more likely to make a perception-based response if the stimulus was perceptually unambiguous rather than equivocal with respect to its identity. Moreover, when children's task was to identify equivocal stimuli, they endorsed the three-informant consensus more than the lone informant. In contrast, when they needed to identify unambiguous stimuli, the number of informants did not influence children's responses. Taken together, the results show that the tendency to resist testimony on the basis of perceptual evidence increases with age. Moreover, preschoolers monitor both the characteristics of their informants and the relative ambiguity of the perceptual stimuli when they need to weigh verbal testimony against perceptual evidence.

Early sensitivity to arguments: how preschoolers weight circular arguments.

Observational studies suggest that children as young as 2 years can evaluate some of the arguments people offer them. However, experimental studies of sensitivity to different arguments have not yet targeted children younger than 5 years. The current study aimed at bridging this gap by testing the ability of preschoolers (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) to weight arguments. To do so, it focused on a common type of fallacy-circularity-to which 5-year-olds are sensitive. The current experiment asked children-and, as a group control, adults-to choose between the contradictory opinions of two speakers. In the first task, participants of all age groups favored an opinion supported by a strong argument over an opinion supported by a circular argument. In the second task, 4- and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds or adults, favored the opinion supported by a circular argument over an unsupported opinion. We suggest that the results of these tasks in 3- to 5-year-olds are best interpreted as resulting from the combination of two mechanisms: (a) basic skills of argument evaluations that process the content of arguments, allowing children as young as 3 years to favor non-circular arguments over circular arguments, and (b) a heuristic that leads older children (4- and 5-year-olds) to give some weight to circular arguments, possibly by interpreting these arguments as a cue to speaker dominance.

Emotional expression and vocabulary learning in adults and children.

A great deal of what we know about the world has not been learned via first-hand observation but thanks to others' testimony. A crucial issue is to know which kind of cues people use to evaluate information provided by others. In this context, recent studies in adults and children underline that informants' facial expressions could play an essential role. To test the importance of the other's emotions in vocabulary learning, we used two avatars expressing happiness, anger or neutral emotions when proposing different verbal labels for an unknown object. Experiment 1 revealed that adult participants were significantly more likely than chance to choose the label suggested by the avatar displaying a happy face over the label suggested by the avatar displaying an angry face. Experiment 2 extended these results by showing that both adults and children as young as 3 years old showed this effect. These data suggest that decision making concerning newly acquired information depends on informant's expressions of emotions, a finding that is consistent with the idea that behavioural intents have facial signatures that can be used to detect another's intention to cooperate.

Developmental changes in category-based inductions: The effects of labels and statistical evidence on children's inferences about novel social categories.

The psychological mechanisms that subserve inductions about novel social categories in childhood are hotly debated. While research demonstrated that language, and in particular generic statements, plays a major role in how children learn to attribute properties to social categories, developmental theories propose other mechanisms. One theoretical account holds that the mere act of labeling social categories is sufficient for children to generalize properties to category members, because labels are considered as referring to significant, homogeneous kinds of people. A second theoretical account proposes that children generalize properties to category members from statistical evidence, that is, by directly observing regularities in their environment. The present study assessed those two hypotheses, by testing (via an online experiment) the effects of simple category labels and observation of statistical evidence on European 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 88) and 7- to 9-year-olds' (N = 92) predictions about novel social categories. From around 7 to 9 years, children generalized properties to category members based on simple category labels or on their observation of a majority of unlabeled category members having the same property. Four- to 6-year-old children, however, made similarity inferences only when both labels and statistical evidence were combined. Overall, the present study highlights a developmental shift from an early limited tendency to make similarity inferences to a later propensity to infer similarity from small evidence. These findings deepen our understanding of the conditions under which children start to make similarity inferences. Implications for the acquisition of stereotypes are also discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Reading minds or reading scripts? De-intellectualising theory of mind.

Understanding the origins of human social cognition is a central challenge in contemporary science. In recent decades, the idea of a 'Theory of Mind' (ToM) has emerged as the most popular way of explaining unique features of human social cognition. This default view has been progressively undermined by research on 'implicit' ToM, which suggests that relevant precursor abilities may already be present in preverbal human infants and great apes. However, this area of research suffers from conceptual difficulties and empirical limitations, including explanatory circularity, over-intellectualisation, and inconsistent empirical replication. Our article breaks new ground by adapting 'script theory' for application to both linguistic and non-linguistic agents. It thereby provides a new theoretical framework able to resolve the aforementioned issues, generate novel predictions, and provide a plausible account of how individuals make sense of the behaviour of others. Script theory is based on the premise that pre-verbal infants and great apes are capable of basic forms of agency-detection and non-mentalistic goal understanding, allowing individuals to form event-schemata that are then used to make sense of the behaviour of others. We show how script theory circumvents fundamental problems created by ToM-based frameworks, explains patterns of inconsistent replication, and offers important novel predictions regarding how humans and other animals understand and predict the behaviour of others.

The power of well-connected arguments: early sensitivity to the connective because.

Connectives, such as because, are routinely used by parents when addressing their children, yet we do not know to what extent children are sensitive to their use. Given children's early developing abilities to evaluate testimony and produce arguments containing connectives, it was hypothesized that young children would show an appropriate reaction to the presence of connectives. Three experiments were conducted to test this hypothesis. In each, two informants gave contradicting statements regarding the location of an object and justified their positions by using a similar argument. Only one of the informants used the connective because to link his argument to the statement. In each experiment, the 3-year-olds performed at chance in selecting choices containing the connective because, but the 4- and 5-year-olds performed above chance. Moreover, in Experiments 2 and 3, the 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults performed significantly better than the 3-year-olds. These findings show that 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults are sensitive to the presence of connectives. An interpretation of the difference in performance between the 3-year-olds and the 4- and 5-year-olds in terms of metarepresentational skills is suggested.

Am I really seeing what's around me? An ERP study on social anxiety under speech induction, uncertainty and social feedback.

Cognitive models of social anxiety propose that socially anxious individuals engage in excessive self-focusing attention when entering a social situation. In the present study, speech anxiety was induced to socially anxious and control participants. Event-related potentials were recorded while participants performed a perceptual judgement task using distinct or ambiguous stimuli, before and after social feedback. Disputed feedback led to more revisions and decreased levels of confidence, especially among socially anxious individuals. Prior feedback, greater occipital P1 amplitudes in both groups for ambiguous probes indicated heightened sensory facilitation to ambiguous information, and greater anterior N1 amplitudes for ambiguous stimuli in highly anxious participants suggested anticipation of negative feedback in this group. Post-feedback, P1, N1 and LPP amplitudes were reduced overall among socially anxious individuals indicating a reduction in sensory facilitation of visual information. These results suggest excessive self-focusing among socially anxious individuals, possibly linked to anticipation of an anxiety-provoking social situation.

The ABC of social learning: Affect, behavior, and cognition.

Debates concerning social learning in the behavioral and the developmental cognitive sciences have largely ignored the literature on social influence in the affective sciences despite having arguably the same object of study. We argue that this is a mistake and that no complete model of social learning can exclude an affective aspect. In addition, we argue that including affect can advance the somewhat stagnant debates concerning the unique characteristics of social learning in humans compared to other animals. We first review the two major bodies of literature in nonhuman animals and human development, highlighting the fact that the former has adopted a behavioral approach while the latter has adopted a cognitive approach, leading to irreconcilable differences. We then introduce a novel framework, affective social learning (ASL), that studies the way we learn about value(s). We show that all three approaches are complementary and focus, respectively, on behavior toward; cognitions concerning; and feelings about objects, events, and people in our environment. All three thus contribute to an affective, behavioral, and cognitive (ABC) story of knowledge transmission: the ABC of social learning. In particular, ASL can provide the backbone of an integrative approach to social learning. We argue that this novel perspective on social learning can allow both evolutionary continuity and ontogenetic development by lowering the cognitive thresholds that appear often too complex for other species and nonverbal infants. Yet, it can also explain some of the major achievements only found in human cultures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Social cognition is not reducible to theory of mind: when children use deontic rules to predict the behaviour of others.

The objective of this paper is to discuss whether children have a capacity for deontic reasoning that is irreducible to mentalizing. The results of two experiments point to the existence of such non-mentalistic understanding and prediction of the behaviour of others. In Study 1, young children (3- and 4-year-olds) were told different versions of classic false-belief tasks, some of which were modified by the introduction of a rule or a regularity. When the task (a standard change of location task) included a rule, the performance of 3-year-olds, who fail traditional false-belief tasks, significantly improved. In Study 2, 3-year-olds proved to be able to infer a rule from a social situation and to use it in order to predict the behaviour of a character involved in a modified version of the false-belief task. These studies suggest that rules play a central role in the social cognition of young children and that deontic reasoning might not necessarily involve mind reading.