Becoming a member: The role of affective deontic markers in social learning
Diğer Uluslararası Fon Programları, 2024 - 2028
- Proje Türü: Diğer Uluslararası Fon Programları
- Başlama Tarihi: Haziran 2024
- Bitiş Tarihi: Mayıs 2028
Proje Özeti
Human societies are distinguished by their remarkable complexity, consisting of a sophisticated interplay of rules, beliefs, roles, and institutions that have long puzzled sociologists, anthropologists, and historians since the inception of social sciences. Nevertheless, children across all cultures can grasp the nuances of their respective societies within a few years, eventually becoming fully-fledged members of their communities. This extraordinary cognitive accomplishment lies at the heart of this project, which seeks to leverage concepts and methodologies from developmental psychology to gain deeper insights into the nature of socialization processes.
Emile Durkheim emphasized the significance of education in maintaining social entities, asserting that children must learn what is expected of them and what they can anticipate from their social surroundings to be part of a society. This learning process is often regarded as the outcome of deliberate pedagogical activity, with adults explicitly imparting necessary knowledge to newcomers to integrate them into the group. In other words, social learning is frequently conceptualized through the metaphor of teacher-student interactions.
While not discounting the importance of explicit scaffolding in children's development, this project aims to explore forms of social learning that do not necessitate intentional teaching. Children are, in fact, astute observers of their social environment, utilizing the emotional reactions of more experienced group members in their daily lives to discern socially appropriate behaviors and attitudes. Consequently, others' emotional expressions can be viewed as deontic markers, offering valuable indirect cues about how one should conduct themselves in various situations.
To account for such emotional modes of socialization, we have recently proposed a theoretical model called affective social learning, which notably focuses on affective observation. In this context, observers acquire information about the world, particularly their social environment, by observing the emotional reactions of individuals who are simply responding to events they happen to witness. By expressing disapproval or approval, these experienced community members can unintentionally convey crucial information about evaluating actions, individuals, or objects. Affective observation refers to the gathering of information by newcomers without the experienced group members intentionally transmitting it.
In this four-year project, which includes one postdoctoral and one PhD positions, we aim to empirically examine the process by which preschoolers connect deontic information to emotional reactions not directed towards them. Our primary objective is to assess preschoolers' ability to detect positive or negative reactions of rule-bearers and to use them to infer the expected behaviors of members within their community. Specifically, we will test preschoolers' developmental competence in (a) inferring a given rule from two different affective reactions, (b) generalizing that rule to predict similar behaviors from other members in the same social setting, (c) discriminating between conflicting informants embodying different status, and (d) considering consensus among different rule-bearers to determine expected behaviors.
This project builds upon previous research funded by the Swiss National Funds, particularly on credulity and epistemic vigilance, naïve sociology, and affective social learning. The team will be integrated into a robust research network, including the NCCR "Evolving Language", the Cognitive Science Center and the Babylab at the University of Neuchâtel, and the Affective Science Centre at the University of Geneva. Collaboration with the University of Vienna (Prof. Günter Knöblich) is also planned to further enhance and broaden our understanding of the cognitive and affective competencies that enable us to become fully integrated members of our social communities.