Preschoolers’ Trust in Social Consensus Varies by Contextconventional vs. Moral Domains

  1. Silvia Guerrero
  2. Laura Elenbaas
  3. Ileana Enesco
  4. Melanie Killen
Journal:
Anales de psicología

ISSN: 0212-9728,  1695-2294

Year of publication: 2017

Volume: 33

Issue: 1

Pages: 142-151

Type: Article

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More publications in: Anales de psicología

Abstract

Do young children give priority to following personal beliefs over the testimony of a majority group of adults that approves of social exclusion? Following current research on children’s preference for nondissenters when learning the names for novel objects, this study investigated children’s preference for consensus opinion in two contexts: Interracial social exclusion among peers and novel object labeling. The goal was to examine the generalizability of preference for the opinion of nondissenters in a socially relevant context. This study was conducted with 90 preschool children from the Spanish ethnic majority group. The findings revealed that participants sided with the consensus significantly less often in the social exclusion context than in the novel object labeling context. Moreover, young children did not defer to the opinion of a numerical consensus in the socially meaningful context when a group condoned the exclusion of a peer from a group activity, even when the peer was from an outgroup social category. Instead, participants agreed with a dissenter who claimed that it was not okay to exclude someone, despite the opposite opinion of a numerical majority. These results provide new information regarding children’s social knowledge development

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Funding information

The study presented in this article was supported by the Ministerio de Econom?a y Competitividad of Spain (PSI2012-E31477), awarded to Ileana Enesco. The study was also supported by a research grant to the first author from the Ministerio de Educaci?n of Spain, ?Jos? Castillejo? (JC2011-0268).

Funders

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