Do Children Copy an Expert or a Majority? Examining Selective Learning in Instrumental and Normative Contexts.

ABSTRACT: This study examined whether instrumental and normative learning contexts differentially influence 4- to 7-year-old children's social learning strategies; specifically, their dispositions to copy an expert versus a majority consensus. Experiment 1 (N = 44) established that children copied a relatively competent "expert" individual over an incompetent individual in both kinds of learning context. In experiment 2 (N = 80) we then tested whether children would copy a competent individual versus a majority, in each of the two different learning contexts. Results showed that individual children differed in strategy, preferring with significant consistency across two different test trials to copy either the competent individual or the majority. This study is the first to show that children prefer

SUBMITTER: Burdett ER 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5074571 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature