Children's Conformity When Acquiring Novel Conventions: The Case of Artifacts

Abstract

Prior research focused on children's acquisition of arbitrary social conventions (e.g., object labels) has revealed that both 3- and 4-year-old children conform to majority opinion. Two studies explored whether children show similar conformist tendencies when making category-based judgments about a less socially arbitrary domain that offers an objective basis for judgment: object functions. Three- and 4-year-old children watched a video in which two informants disagreed with a lone dissenter on the function of a novel artifact. Children were asked to categorize the object by stating with whom they agreed. The plausibility of the majority's response was manipulated across test trials. Results demonstrated that children were more likely to agree with the majority when majority and minority opinions were equally plausible, especially when the majority demonstrated an overt consensus. However, 4-year-olds actively eschewed the majority opinion when it was implausible in context of the artifact's functional design. The current results indicate that expertise in a domain of conventional knowledge reduces conformist tendencies.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are given to the many participating preschool teachers, parents, and children in the Boston area who made this study possible. Thanks also go to Natalie Emmons, Elisa Järnefelt, Josh Rottman, and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on earlier drafts; to Eva Cassedy, Cara DiYanni, Liz Donovan, Susan Fenstermacher, Brenda Phillips, Evie Rosset, Julia Rubin, and Melissa Yanovitch for their help in creating test stimuli; to Christine Mihal, Carina Wind, and all the research assistants at the Child Cognition Lab for their help in data collection and coding.

Notes

¹Other research that has involved artifacts suggests that the dynamics of deference are very different when other aspects of object-directed behavior aside from categorical judgments about what an artifact is “for” are considered—for example, when confronted with choices of arbitrary means-ends action style to achieve a goal (i.e., tool-use actions; Lyons, Damrosch, Lin, Macris, & Keil, 2011; Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007; Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010).