Three-Year-Old Children Detect Social Exclusion in Third-Party Interactions

Humans are motivated to connect with others and are sensitive to social exclusion—intentionally leaving out others. This ability to detect social exclusion is suggested to be evolutionarily adaptive, biologically hardwired, and an important feature of social-cognitive development. Yet it is unclear when children start to independently detect social exclusion. Previous developmental research on social exclusion has focused on children older than 4 years of age, but recent infancy research has suggested younger children may be able to process complex social interactions such as social exclusion. The present study is the first to examine whether 2to 3-year-old children detect social exclusion and if they prefer to affiliate with individuals who have been excluded over individuals who exclude others. Across 2 experiments, 2and 3-year-old children (N = 140) viewed exclusive group interactions, in which 2 agents unjustly excluded 1 agent, and children were asked to choose whether they preferred to play with an excluded agent or an exclusive agent. Three-year-old children consistently preferred to play with the excluded agent, whereas 2-year-old children showed no preference. Three-year-old children did not show a preference among agents engaged in inclusive interactions and did not prefer an agent who refused to engage with a group, showing that 3-year-old children distinguish unjust exclusion from other types of interactions. Together, these findings suggest 3-year-old children detect social exclusion and are motivated to affiliate with unjustly excluded agents over those who exclude others, whereas these capacities are still developing in 2-year-old children. Human nature is profoundly social and shaped by a desire to form and maintain relationships. This statement is evidenced by a strong motivation to belong and by distress in situations that undermine belonging: Children cry when separated from parents; adolescents suffer anxiety about being accepted by peers; and loneliness can exacerbate health problems in adults (Abrams, Hogg, & Marques, 2005; Baumeister & Leary, 1995). In fact, sensitivity to exclusion is argued to be evolutionarily adaptive and biologically hardwired from birth (Spoor & Williams, 2006). However, no empirical study to date has directly tested the claim that young children readily detect social interactions in which people intentionally leave out or ignore another person. CONTACT Hyesung G. Hwang [email protected] Psychological & Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis, 1 Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA. Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/hjcd. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website. JOURNAL OF COGNITION AND DEVELOPMENT https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2017.1368517 © 2017 Taylor & Francis D ow nl oa de d by [ W as hi ng to n U ni ve rs ity in S t L ou is ] at 0 6: 33 1 8 O ct ob er 2 01 7 Although social exclusion and bullying have been observed in children as young as 3 to 4 years old (Crick, Casas, & Mosher, 1997), experimental research examining children’s sensitivity to social exclusion has been mostly limited to children aged 4 years or older. Studies using sociometric measures have shown that 4to 5-year-old children can reliably identify peers who are bullies and those who are victims of bullying (Crick & Grotpeter, 1995). Interview methods, in which experimenters tell children a story about unjust social exclusion (e.g., excluding someone based on race or gender), have revealed that by age 4 years, children judge unjust exclusion as wrong (Killen & Rutland, 2011). Social domain theory (Smetana, Jambon, & Ball, 2014; Turiel, 2006) and related perspectives (Killen & Smetana, 2015; Rutland, Killen, & Abrams, 2010) suggest children’s evaluation of social exclusion involves weighing moral judgments with social-conventional judgments and evolves with age. These frameworks have significantly advanced our understanding of older children’s moral development and reasoning about social exclusion. However, little work has been conducted with children younger than 4 years old. Interviews and sociometric measures are unreliable with 2to 3-year-old children, who tend to have limited language skills (Alsaker & Valkanover, 2001). Furthermore, previous studies have provided children with verbal descriptions of exclusion, thereby making it unclear whether children can independently detect social exclusion. Recent efforts have begun to characterize children’s nonverbal responses to social exclusion. Studies have shown that 3to 5-year-old children imitated an experimenter more after being primed with ostracism interactions than inclusive interactions; this increase in imitation was hypothesized to represent an adaptive, affiliative response to the threat of feeling excluded (Over & Carpenter, 2009; Watson-Jones, Legare, Whitehouse, & Clegg, 2014; Watson-Jones, Whitehouse, & Legare, 2015). One study, which more directly tested children’s detection of exclusion, showed that 4and 5-yearold children could identify exclusion after watching geometric shapes being ostracized (Song, Over, & Carpenter, 2015); however, younger children were not tested. Thus, it is unclear if children younger than 4 years of age have the capacity to independently detect social exclusion in naturalistic situations without an adult’s explicit, verbal description. We therefore tested 2and 3-year-old children’s social exclusion detection to further our understanding of the social-cognitive development that occurs in this age range. Social domain theory research has suggested children understand physical harm by 2.5 years of age, but understanding of psychological harm develops later (Smetana, 2006; Smetana & Braeges, 1990), possibly because psychological harm must be inferred, whereas physical harm is directly observable (Smetana, 1981; Wainryb & Brehl, 2006). Because social exclusion results in psychological harm rather than physical harm, 2-year-old children may not readily detect social exclusion compared with 3-year-old children. On the other hand, early-developing cognitive mechanisms may support social exclusion detection in young children. Infant research has suggested that the awareness of social interactions begins early in ontogeny. In the 1st year of life, infants distinguish between agents and nonagents (Johnson, Slaughter, & Carey, 1998) and begin to attribute intentions to agents (Gergely, Nádasdy, Csibra, & Biro, 1995; Meltzoff, 1995; Woodward, 2009). Infants also demonstrate an aversion to antisocial agents, but a preference for prosocial agents (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007), and show a rudimentary sense of fairness (Sommerville, Schmidt, Yun, & Burns, 2013). Twoand 3-year-old children also begin to understand more sophisticated 2 H. G. HWANG ET AL. D ow nl oa de d by [ W as hi ng to n U ni ve rs ity in S t L ou is ] at 0 6: 33 1 8 O ct ob er 2 01 7 concepts shared in groups, such as cultural conventions (Diesendruck & Markson, 2011) and norms (Rakoczy & Schmidt, 2013). Thus, even 2-year-old children may already be equipped with the basic cognitive mechanisms to detect social exclusion. To test these competing theoretical possibilities, 2and 3-year-old children were presented with naturalistic inclusiveand exclusive-group interactions via a live puppet show (Experiment 1) or video clips of adults interacting (Experiment 2), all in the absence of any verbal description. Each social exclusion interaction depicted an agent who was unjustly excluded. We chose to investigate unjust social exclusion—although there are many types of social exclusion—as a first attempt to understand this multifaceted phenomenon. Due to the limited verbal abilities of children younger than 4 years old, we employed a preference task to assess whether children can differentiate agents in a socially exclusive interaction. Preference tasks have proven to be a successful measure for assessing children’s social reasoning. Children’s preferences for individuals align with their explicit social judgments, as in the case of preference for linguistic ingroup versus outgroup members (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007). Infants’ preference for prosocial agents converges with other dependent measures assessing social reasoning, such as looking time, gaze expectations, and sharing behaviors (Geraci & Surian, 2011; Hamlin et al., 2007; Kuhlmeier, Dunfield, & O’Neill, 2014). We predicted that if children are unable to detect social exclusion, they should not differentiate between an exclusive versus excluded agent and will fail to show a preference to affiliate with one of these agents. However, if children can detect social exclusion, they should distinguish between exclusive and excluded agents and should prefer the excluded agent as children tend to show sympathetic responses to harmed agents (Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, Wagner, & Chapman, 1992) and aversion toward antisocial agents (Hamlin et al., 2007).