Children’s expectations of selective informing: The role of informational relevance on group membership based informing

Abstract

Surprisingly little is known about how informational relevance guides children’s informing decisions. Although prior studies have demonstrated that children selectively inform and teach others these studies do not directly address whether children consider informational relevance specific to an outgroup member. We also know that children by age 5 and 6 show robust preferences for their ingroup members in various decisions but does information relevance modulate their ingroup preferences? In three experiments (N = 180), we investigated whether Iraqi Kurdish 6-year-old children expect others to inform an ingroup member or an outgroup member, depending on the informational relevance. In Experiment 1 children expected others to inform an ingroup member rather than an outgroup member irrespective of information type – extending prior work on ingroup preferences. In experiments 2 and 3, in which the relevance of the information to an outgroup member was highlighted, children’s expectation about informing an ingroup member was modulated by information type. Together, the findings suggest that children consider informational relevance to guide their expectations about others’ selective informing in the context of group membership, which could further explain how cultural knowledge is maintained and reinforced among members of the same cultural group.