Data_Sebastián-enesco et al..xls

Empirical study: What makes children defy their peers? Chinese and Spanish preschoolers' decisions to trust (or not) a peer consensus.

Authors: Carla Sebastián-Enesco (Universidad de la Rioja, Spain), Silvia Guerrero (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain) , Ileana Enesco (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain).

Abstract. When individuals do not have enough knowledge to evaluate a situation, they usually seek what others have to say. The more people agreeing on the same information, the more likely are individuals to endorse the testimonial information. Children are sensitive to consensus but their trust on what a majority says also depends on the decision context, their previous knowledge, and interestingly, the culture in which they develop. Here we study the sensitivity of Chinese (N = 60) and Spanish (N = 48) preschoolers to the opinion of a group of peers in consensus regarding the evaluation of peer-interaction events (social evaluation context), and the use of artifacts (object function context). To address the role of children’s prior knowledge, we varied the degree of ambiguity of the situations presented within each context: unfamiliar, ambiguous, and familiar. Crucially, in the familiar situations, the majority offered a counter-intuitive or non-conventional opinion in conflict with “common sense”. Overall, children were more likely to trust the peer consensus in the unfamiliar and ambiguous situations than in the familiar ones. In these latter cases, children showed greater acceptance of non-conventional claims regarding the function of familiar objects than regarding the evaluation of social events. The two cultural groups, however, significantly differed in the degree of endorsement. While Chinese children gave little credibility to their peers’ testimony even when faced by novel information, Spanish children showed a greater deference to their peers, and even sometimes neglected their own criteria. Together with previous findings, these results indicate culture-specific patterns related to children’s attitude towards peers vs. adults as sources of knowledge.

Information about coding and data analysis. The dependent variable was the endorsement of the majority view in the different contexts. We coded 1 if the participants chose the option provided by the majority, and 0 if they opted for the alternative. The experimenter registered the participants’ choices in situ. Drawing on the statistical approach implemented in Enesco et al. (2016)’s study, we used the following categorical tests: Binomial tests to determine whether the participants from each cultural community endorsed the majority view above chance level; Chi-square tests to compare choices between Spanish and Chinese children; McNemar tests for the comparisons between contexts of decision (object function and social evaluation) and situations (unfamiliar, ambiguous, and familiar). First, we present the general trends of children’s overall endorsement of the majority view. For this, we computed the total number of choices siding with the majority for each participant across the 12 trials. Second, we focus on the endorsement of the majority view within each context and situation, comparing the Chinese and Spanish children’s choices in each case.