Child Behavior/physiology; Child, Preschool; Female; Humans; Imitative Behavior/physiology; Male; Group Processes; Social Identification; Social Learning; Trust; Child Behavior; Imitative Behavior; Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health; Education; Developmental and Educational Psychology
Abstract :
[en] 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.
Disciplines :
Social, industrial & organizational psychology
Author, co-author :
Gruber, Thibaud; University of Geneva ; University of Oxford
Deschenaux, Amélie; University of Neuchâtel
Frick, Aurélien ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département des sciences cliniques ; University of Edinburgh ; Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples
Clément, Fabrice; University of Neuchâtel
Language :
English
Title :
Group Membership Influences More Social Identification Than Social Learning or Overimitation in Children.
ERC - European Research Council [BE] SNF - Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung [CH]
Funding text :
The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) and from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development, and demonstration under REA grant agreement no. 329197 awarded to Thibaud Gruber. Thibaud Gruber was also supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation during the writing of this article (Grant CR13I1_162720/1). The authors wish to thank the school directors, teachers, parents, and children for participating in the experiments. Thibaud Gruber wishes to thank Christof Neumann and Christine Sievers for discussions, and Brittany Fallon and Cat Hobaiter for English proofreading and discussions about this article. We thank three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on previous versions of the article.
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