Do preschoolers track and evaluate social includers and excluders?

Social exclusion is harmful and leads to negative consequences across the lifespan. Based on studies primarily with adults, psychologists have characterized a highly sensitive "ostracism detection system" that acts quickly and automatically to detect exclusion and mitigate its effects. However, research with children has not fully explored whether a system with similar characteristics is operational in early childhood, and prior work probing children's responses to exclusion has produced mixed findings. We investigated 4- to 6-year-old children's abilities to negatively evaluate those who have excluded them as well as to use these experiences for prosocial gossip. Children engaged one pair of play partners in an inclusive game and engaged another pair in an exclusive game. Nearly one third (n = 28 of 96) did not accurately recall who had excluded them. Yet those who did recall their game experiences evaluated excluders more negatively than includers, and they were less likely to recommend excluders as play partners to others. These findings indicate that not all children sensitively track their excluders' identities-but those who do so will evaluate excluders negatively. More work is needed to understand developments in how and when children recognize their own exclusion and whether the underlying processes should be viewed as homologous to adults' ostracism detection system.

Young children and adults associate social power with indifference to others' needs.

In hierarchical societies, what do we expect from people at the top? Early in life, children use horizontal relationships (e.g., affiliation) to predict selectivity in others' prosocial behavior. But it is unknown whether children also view asymmetries in prosocial behavior as characteristic of vertical relationships (e.g., differences in social power). In two experiments, we investigated 4- to 7-year-old children's and adults' (N = 192) intuitions about links among relative authority status, helpful action, and unhelpful inaction. In Experiment 1, participants at all ages viewed a character who chose not to help another person as holding a position of authority over them; participants also viewed this unhelpful character as being less nice than the person in need. However, no age group made consistent inferences about the relative authority of a helper and a helpee. In Experiment 2, children had mixed intuitions when separately predicting whether high- and low-authority characters would be helpful in the future. However, older children and adults consistently indicated that a subordinate would be more likely than an authority to help a third party. These findings establish that children's social theories include expectations for links between power and prosociality by at least the preschool years. Whereas some judgments in this domain are stable from 4 years of age onward, others emerge gradually. Whether consistent responses occurred early or only later in development, however, all measures converged on a single intuition: People more easily associate authority with indifference to others' needs.

Shyness and Social Conflict Reduce Young Children's Social Helpfulness.

This study examined social influences on 3-year-old children's decisions to help an experimenter gain another person's attention (N = 32). Children were slower to help the experimenter when the target had previously expressed disinterest in attending to her. Shy children were less likely to support the experimenter's attempts to communicate with the target; however, this association was not influenced by children's knowledge of the target's disinterest, and there was no relation between shyness and children's support for a separate physical goal. Therefore, young children's decisions to act helpfully incorporate consideration for others beyond a focal person with an unmet need, and they are further constrained by children's own comfort with the actions required to help.