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Do Children Copy an Expert or a Majority? Examining Selective Learning in Instrumental and Normative Contexts
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 relativel...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5074571/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27768716 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0164698 |
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author | Burdett, Emily R. R. Lucas, Amanda J. Buchsbaum, Daphna McGuigan, Nicola Wood, Lara A. Whiten, Andrew |
author_facet | Burdett, Emily R. R. Lucas, Amanda J. Buchsbaum, Daphna McGuigan, Nicola Wood, Lara A. Whiten, Andrew |
author_sort | Burdett, Emily R. R. |
collection | PubMed |
description | 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 to copy more competent individuals when shown competing methods of achieving an instrumental goal (Experiment 1) and provides new evidence that children, at least in our “individualist” culture, may consistently express either a competency or majority bias in learning both instrumental and normative information (Experiment 2). This effect was similar in the instrumental and normative learning contexts we applied. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5074571 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-50745712016-11-04 Do Children Copy an Expert or a Majority? Examining Selective Learning in Instrumental and Normative Contexts Burdett, Emily R. R. Lucas, Amanda J. Buchsbaum, Daphna McGuigan, Nicola Wood, Lara A. Whiten, Andrew PLoS One Research Article 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 to copy more competent individuals when shown competing methods of achieving an instrumental goal (Experiment 1) and provides new evidence that children, at least in our “individualist” culture, may consistently express either a competency or majority bias in learning both instrumental and normative information (Experiment 2). This effect was similar in the instrumental and normative learning contexts we applied. Public Library of Science 2016-10-21 /pmc/articles/PMC5074571/ /pubmed/27768716 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0164698 Text en © 2016 Burdett et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Burdett, Emily R. R. Lucas, Amanda J. Buchsbaum, Daphna McGuigan, Nicola Wood, Lara A. Whiten, Andrew Do Children Copy an Expert or a Majority? Examining Selective Learning in Instrumental and Normative Contexts |
title | Do Children Copy an Expert or a Majority? Examining Selective Learning in Instrumental and Normative Contexts |
title_full | Do Children Copy an Expert or a Majority? Examining Selective Learning in Instrumental and Normative Contexts |
title_fullStr | Do Children Copy an Expert or a Majority? Examining Selective Learning in Instrumental and Normative Contexts |
title_full_unstemmed | Do Children Copy an Expert or a Majority? Examining Selective Learning in Instrumental and Normative Contexts |
title_short | Do Children Copy an Expert or a Majority? Examining Selective Learning in Instrumental and Normative Contexts |
title_sort | do children copy an expert or a majority? examining selective learning in instrumental and normative contexts |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5074571/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27768716 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0164698 |
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