What Makes Children Defy Majorities? The Role of Dissenters in Chinese and Spanish Preschoolers' Social Judgments.

Ileana Enesco,Silvia Guerrero,Siyu Quan,Sonia Garijo,Carla Sebastián-Enesco

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01695

Abstract

When many people say the same thing, the individual is more likely to endorse this information than when just a single person says the same. Yet, the influence of consensus information may be modulated by many personal, contextual and cultural variables. Here, we study the sensitivity of Chinese (N = 68) and Spanish (N = 82) preschoolers to consensus in social decision making contexts. Children faced two different types of peer-interaction events, which involved (1) uncertain or ambiguous scenarios open to interpretation (social interpretation context), and (2) explicit scenarios depicting the exclusion of a peer (moral judgment context). Children first observed a video in which a group of teachers offered their opinion about the events, and then they were asked to evaluate the information provided. Participants were assigned to two conditions that differed in the type of consensus: Unanimous majority (non-dissenter condition) and non-unanimous majority (dissenter condition). In the dissenter condition, we presented the conflicting opinions of three teachers vs. one teacher. In the non-dissenter condition, we presented the unanimous opinion of three teachers. 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 context), than when they already had a clear interpretation of the situation (moral judgment context); (2) The presence of a dissenter resulted in a significant decrease in children’s confidence in majority. Interestingly, in the moral judgment context, Chinese and Spanish children differed in their willingness to defy a majority whose opinion run against their own. While Spanish children maintained their own criteria regardless of the type of condition, Chinese children did so when an “allied” dissenter was present (dissenter condition) but not when confronting a unanimous majority (non-dissenter condition). Tentatively, we suggest that this difference might be related to culture-specific patterns regarding children’s deference toward adults.

Highlights

Much of our knowledge is acquired from the testimony of others and not from our direct experience
Preliminary analyses indicated that girls and boys did not differ in their trust in majority within each context, Object labeling: χ2(1,300) = 2.67, p = 0.102, Social interpretation: χ2(1,300) = 0.07, p = 0.1796 and Moral judgment: χ2(1,300) = 2.59, p = 0.108
We found no significant effects of the age of participants on their likelihood of siding with the majority (χ2 = 1.194, df = 1, p = 0.275), or order of presentation of the majority vs. dissenter view on children’s decisions to side with the majority, χ2(1,900) = 2.09, p = 0.148

Summary

Introduction

Much of our knowledge is acquired from the testimony of others and not from our direct experience. The findings show that the influence of majority varies according to the degree of consensus (e.g., unanimous vs partial majorities), and to other variables, such as an individual’s prior knowledge (e.g., naïve vs experienced individuals), the ambiguity of the task (e.g., a situation more or less open to interpretation), and various situational determinants (e.g., public or anonymous responses). The strength of the majority is greater when unanimous, the task is new or ambiguous, and the individual’s response is public (see Cialdini and Goldstein, 2004; Haun et al, 2013 for a review). Another source of variability in the way individuals deal with the testimony of others is attributed to culture. Some cross-cultural studies have reported that adults socialized in East Asian countries tend to rely on consensus more than adults socialized in Western post-industrial countries (Huang and Harris, 1973; Fiske et al, 1998; Kim and Markus, 1999)

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