Group presence, category labels, and generic statements influence children to treat descriptive group regularities as prescriptive.
Children use descriptive regularities of social groups (what is) to generate prescriptive judgments (what should be). We examined whether this tendency held when the regularities were introduced through group presence, category labels, or generic statements. Children (ages 4-9years, N=203) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions that manipulated how descriptive group regularities were presented: group presence (e.g., "These ones [a group of three individuals] eat this kind of berry"), category labels (e.g., "This [individual] Hibble eats this kind of berry"), generic statements (e.g., [showing an individual] "Hibbles eat this kind of berry"), or control (e.g., "This one [individual] eats this kind of berry"). Then, children saw conforming and non-conforming individuals and were asked to evaluate their behavior. As predicted, children evaluated non-conformity negatively in all conditions except the control condition. Together, these results suggest that minimal perceptual and linguistic cues provoke children to treat social groups as having normative force.
Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. Electronic address: sothello@umich.edu.
Steven O
SO
Roberts
Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
Arnold K
AK
Ho
Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
Susan A
SA
Gelman
D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D012925:Social Conformity; D012945:Social Values; D013240:Stereotyping
Category labels; Conformity; Generics; Normative reasoning; Novel groups; Social cognitive development