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

Abstract

© 2016 Burdett et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. 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.

Citation

Burdett, E. R. R., Lucas, A. J., Buchsbaum, D., McGuigan, N., Wood, L. A., & Whiten, A. (2016). Do Children Copy an Expert or a Majority? Examining Selective Learning in Instrumental and Normative Contexts. PLoS ONE, 11(10), Article e0164698. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0164698

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 4, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Oct 21, 2016
• Publication Date: Oct 1, 2016
• Deposit Date: Nov 28, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 21, 2020
• Journal: PLOS ONE
• Electronic ISSN: 1932-6203
• Publisher: Public Library of Science
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 10
• Article Number: e0164698
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0164698
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2839283
• Publisher URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0164698