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138: What makes children to confront a majority of “wrong” teachers? The role of dissenters in Chinese and Spanish preschoolers’ social judgments.

Much of our knowledge is acquired from the testimony of others and not from our direct experience. A crucial issue is to know what makes people accept (or reject) the information provided by others. In this respect, research with adults reveals that the degree of consensus among informants and the degree of task uncertainty both play essential roles. Interestingly enough, the way individuals are affected by these, and other, variables when deciding to endorse others’ testimony appears to be modulated by their cultural background. Studies with children are far less numerous than with adults, and more importantly, only few of them are conducted in countries other than the US.
This work studies Chinese and Spanish preschoolers’ trust in the testimony of schoolteachers in social decision making contexts, following two between-subjects conditions: the presence or absence of a dissenter. Children faced two different types of peer-interaction events, which involved (1) uncertain or ambiguous scenarios open to interpretation, and (2) explicit scenarios depicting the exclusion of a peer. Children had to make decisions after listening to the conflicting opinions of three teachers vs. one teacher (dissenter condition), or to the unanimous opinion of three teachers (non-dissenter condition).
The general results indicated that children’s sensitivity to consensus varies depending both on the degree of ambiguity of the social events and the presence or not of a dissenter: 1) Children were much more likely to endorse the majority view when they were uncertain (social interpretation task), than when they already had a clear interpretation of the situation (moral judgment task); 2) The presence of a dissenter resulted in a significant decrease in children’s confidence in majority. The only cultural difference was found in the peer exclusion situation: Chinese children relied on the presence of a dissenter to maintain their own criteria. Spanish children, by contrast, maintained their opinion, regardless of the type of consensus. We discuss the alternative interpretations of this cultural difference.

Author(s):

Carla Sebastián-Enesco    
William James Research Center ISPA– Instituto Universitário, Lisboa
Portugal

Silvia Guerrero    
Departamento de Psicología, Facultad de Educación, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Toledo
Spain

Ileana Enesco    
Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Spain