Rational learners and parochial norms

Lakens D.

An important step when designing an empirical study is to justify the sample size that will be collected. The key aim of a sample size justification for such studies is to explain how the collected data is expected to provide valuable information given the inferential goals of the researcher. In this overview article six approaches are discussed to justify the sample size in a quantitative empirical study: 1) collecting data from (almost) the entire population, 2) choosing a sample size based on resource constraints, 3) performing an a-priori power analysis, 4) planning for a desired accuracy, 5) using heuristics, or 6) explicitly acknowledging the absence of a justification. An important question to consider when justifying sample sizes is which effect sizes are deemed interesting, and the extent to which the data that is collected informs inferences about these effect sizes. Depending on the sample size justification chosen, researchers could consider 1) what the smallest effect size of interest is, 2) which minimal effect size will be statistically significant, 3) which effect sizes they expect (and what they base these expectations on), 4) which effect sizes would be rejected based on a confidence interval around the effect size, 5) which ranges of effects a study has sufficient power to detect based on a sensitivity power analysis, and 6) which effect sizes are expected in a specific research area. Researchers can use the guidelines presented in this article, for example by using the interactive form in the accompanying online Shiny app, to improve their sample size justification, and hopefully, align the informational value of a study with their inferential goals.

Noyes A., Dunham Y., Keil F.C., Ritchie K.

Several current theories have essences as primary drivers of inductive potential: e.g., people infer dogs share properties because they share essences. We investigated the possibility that people take occupational roles as having robust inductive potential because of a different source: their position in stable social institutions. In Studies 1-4, participants learned a novel property about a target, and then decided whether two new individuals had the property (one with the same occupation, one without). Participants used occupational roles to robustly generalize rights and obligations, functional behaviors, personality traits, and skills. In Studies 5-6, we contrasted occupational roles (via label) with race/gender (via visual face cues). Participants reliably favored occupational roles over race/gender for generalizing rights and obligations, functional behaviors, personality traits, and skills (they favored race/gender for inferring leisure behaviors and physiological properties). Occupational roles supported inferences to the same extent as animal categories (Studies 4 and 6). In Study 7, we examined why members of occupational roles share properties. Participants did not attribute the inductive potential of occupational roles to essences, they attributed it to social institutions. In combination, these seven studies demonstrate that any theory of inductive potential must pluralistically allow for both essences and social institutions to form the basis of inductive potential.

Heck I.A., Bas J., Kinzler K.D.

Participants (N = 384 three- to ten-year-olds; 51% girls, 49% boys; 73% White, 18% multiracial/other, 5% Asian, and 3% Black; N = 610 adults) saw depictions of 20 individuals split into two social groups (1:19; 2:18; 5:15; or 8:12 per group) and selected which group was "in charge" (Experiment 1), "the leader" (Experiment 2), or likely to "get the stuff" (resources) in a conflict (Experiment 3). Whereas participants across ages predicted the larger group would "get the stuff," a tendency to view smaller groups as "in charge" and "the leader" strengthened with age and when the smaller group was rarer. These findings suggest the perceived relation between numerical group size and hierarchy is flexible and inform theory regarding the developmental trajectories of reasoning about power and status.

Borsboom D., van der Maas H.L., Dalege J., Kievit R.A., Haig B.D.

This article aims to improve theory formation in psychology by developing a practical methodology for constructing explanatory theories: theory construction methodology (TCM). TCM is a sequence of five steps. First, the theorist identifies a domain of empirical phenomena that becomes the target of explanation. Second, the theorist constructs a prototheory, a set of theoretical principles that putatively explain these phenomena. Third, the prototheory is used to construct a formal model, a set of model equations that encode explanatory principles. Fourth, the theorist investigates the explanatory adequacy of the model by formalizing its empirical phenomena and assessing whether it indeed reproduces these phenomena. Fifth, the theorist studies the overall adequacy of the theory by evaluating whether the identified phenomena are indeed reproduced faithfully and whether the explanatory principles are sufficiently parsimonious and substantively plausible. We explain TCM with an example taken from research on intelligence (the mutualism model of intelligence), in which key elements of the method have been successfully implemented. We discuss the place of TCM in the larger scheme of scientific research and propose an outline for a university curriculum that can systematically educate psychologists in the process of theory formation.

Heck I.A., Kushnir T., Kinzler K.D.

We tested whether preschool-aged children (N = 280) track an agents' choices of individuals from novel social groups (i.e., social choices) to infer an agent's social preferences and the social status of the groups. Across experiments, children saw a box containing 2 groups (red and blue toy cats). In Experiment 1, children were randomly assigned to Social Selection in which items were described as "friends," or to Object Selection in which items were described as "toys." Within each selection type, the agent selected 5 items from either a numerically common group (82% of box; selections appearing random) or a numerically rare group (18% of box; selections violating random sampling). After watching these selections, children were asked who the agent would play with among 3 individuals: 1 from the selected group, 1 from the unselected group, or 1 from a novel group. Only participants who viewed Social Selection of a numerically rare group predicted that the agent would select an individual from that group in the future. These participants also said an individual from the selected group was the "leader." Subsequent experiments further probed the Social Selection findings. Children's reasoning depended on the agent actively selecting the friends (Experiment 2), and children thought a member of the rare selected group was the leader, but not the "helper" (Experiment 3). These results illustrate that children track an agent's positive social choices to reason about that agent's social preferences and to infer the status (likelihood of being a leader) of novel social groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Riggs A.E., Long M.

The current research investigated a potential mental shortcut that facilitates children’s categorization and generalization of social behavior, called the Domain Frequency Association (DFA). The DFA is a bidirectional association in which children automatically connect a behavioral domain (e.g., norm or preference) with behavioral frequency (e.g., whether many or few group members demonstrate the behavior). When children observe a majority of group members demonstrating a behavior they may assume that the behavior is a norm that all group members should follow. When a minority of group members demonstrates a behavior, children may infer that it is a choice or preference that group members can decide to follow or not. We explored whether children utilized the DFA in two tasks: In Study 1, we provided 4- and 5-year-old preschool (n = 25) and 7- and 8-year-old school-aged children (n = 26) with evidence of either frequency or domain and asked them to verbally provide the other attribute using a forced-choice response measure. Children selected norms more often when behaviors were frequent versus infrequent and selected preferences more often when behaviors were infrequent versus frequent. In Study 2, we examined 4- and 5-year-old preschool children’s (n = 25) and 7- and 8-year-old young school-aged children’s (n = 25) memory patterns for DFA-consistent information (e.g., frequent norms & infrequent preferences) and DFA-inconsistent information (e.g., infrequent norms & frequent preferences). Children were more likely to remember DFA-consistent information than DFA-inconsistent information and tended to misremember inconsistent information as consistent. Together these results demonstrate the presence of an early emerging inferential strategy that structures children’s thinking about the social world.

Chalik L., Rhodes M.

In this chapter we present the perspective that social groups serve as moral boundaries. Social groups establish the bounds within which people hold moral obligations toward one another. The belief that people are morally obligated toward fellow social group members, but not toward members of other groups, is an early-emerging feature of human cognition, arising out of domain-general processes in conceptual development. We review evidence that supports this account from the adult and child moral cognition literature, and we describe the developmental processes by which people come to view social groups as shaping moral obligation. We conclude with suggestions about how this account can inform the study of social cognitive development more broadly, as well as how it can be used to promote positive moral socialization.

Clark C.J., Liu B.S., Winegard B.M., Ditto P.H.

Humans evolved in the context of intense intergroup competition, and groups comprised of loyal members more often succeeded than groups comprised of nonloyal members. Therefore, selective pressures have sculpted human minds to be tribal, and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. Modern politics is one of the most salient forms of modern coalitional conflict and elicits substantial cognitive biases. The common evolutionary history of liberals and conservatives gives little reason to expect protribe biases to be higher on one side of the political spectrum than the other. This evolutionarily plausible null hypothesis has been supported by recent research. In a recent meta-analysis, liberals and conservatives showed similar levels of partisan bias, and several protribe cognitive tendencies often ascribed to conservatives (e.g., intolerance toward dissimilar other people) were found in similar degrees in liberals. We conclude that tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition and that no group—not even one’s own—is immune.

Xu F.

This article provides a synthesis and overview of a theory of cognitive development, rational constructivism. The basic tenets of this view are as follows: (a) Initial state: Human infants begin life with a set of proto-conceptual primitives. These early representations are not in the format of a language of thought. (b) Mature state: Human adults represent the world in terms of a set of domain-specific intuitive theories. (c) Three types of mechanisms account for learning, development, and conceptual change: language and symbol learning, Bayesian inductive learning, and constructive thinking. (d) The child is an active learner, and cognitive agency is part and parcel of development. I will discuss each of these tenets, and provide an overview of the kind of empirical evidence that supports this view. This is a non-Piagetian view though it is in the spirit of constructivist theories of development; this view emphasizes the utility of formal computational models in understanding learning and developmental change. Lastly, this view also has implications for the study of philosophy of mind and epistemology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Cushman F., Gershman S.

Roberts S.O., Horii R.I.

Children often infer that descriptive group norms (i.e., how a group is) are prescriptive (i.e., how group members should be), and this descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency, which biases children a...

Ayars A., Nichols S.

Recent work in folk metaethics finds a correlation between perceived consensus about a moral claim and meta-ethical judgments about whether the claim is universally or only relatively true. We argue that consensus can provide evidence for meta-normative claims, such as whether a claim is universally true. We then report several experiments indicating that people use consensus to make inferences about whether a claim is universally true. This suggests that people's beliefs about relativism and universalism are partly guided by evidence-based reasoning. In a final study, we show that the rejection of universalism does not generate a simple subjectivism but is associated with a more moderate relativism on which highly atypical positions are regarded as mistaken.

Muthukrishna M., Henrich J.

The replication crisis facing the psychological sciences is widely regarded as rooted in methodological or statistical shortcomings. We argue that a large part of the problem is the lack of a cumulative theoretical framework or frameworks. Without an overarching theoretical framework that generates hypotheses across diverse domains, empirical programs spawn and grow from personal intuitions and culturally biased folk theories. By providing ways to develop clear predictions, including through the use of formal modelling, theoretical frameworks set expectations that determine whether a new finding is confirmatory, nicely integrating with existing lines of research, or surprising, and therefore requiring further replication and scrutiny. Such frameworks also prioritize certain research foci, motivate the use diverse empirical approaches and, often, provide a natural means to integrate across the sciences. Thus, overarching theoretical frameworks pave the way toward a more general theory of human behaviour. We illustrate one such a theoretical framework: dual inheritance theory. Muthukrishna & Henrich argue that solving the replication crisis in psychology partly requires well-specified, overarching theoretical frameworks. They outline how dual inheritance theory provides one such example that could be adopted by the field.

Chernyak N., Kang C., Kushnir T.

Making sense of human actions involves thinking about both endogenous influences (the internal mental states of agents) and exogenous influences (social, moral, and interpersonal constraints). Culture impacts how we weight the relative causal influence of these two influences. To examine these cultural influences in depth, we asked 147 4-11-year-olds in 3 cultural groups (Singaporean Chinese, Singaporean Malay, and U.S. Americans) about the possibility of acting on desires that go against social, moral, and interpersonal norms (i.e., "free will," defined as the ability to do otherwise). By age 4, U.S. children were more likely to endorse the freedom to act against norms than Singaporean children, and these cultural differences were more prevalent at older ages. Children's explanations mirrored between- and within-culture differences in causal beliefs about action: Both groups of Singaporean children referenced interdependent causes/consequences in their explanations than U.S. children, and Singaporean Malay children referenced more interdependent causes/consequences than Singaporean Chinese children. Singaporean children were more likely to elaborate on lack of free will by referencing punishment and/or having to seek permission from authorities, revealing a local cultural influence of growing up in an authoritarian society. These results underscore the critical role of culture in shaping how children understand mind, self, and action. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Roberts S.O., Ho A.K., Gelman S.A.

Children often believe that how a group is reflects how individual group members should be. We provided a strong test of this descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency by examining whether children (Ages 4 to 9) maintained the correctness of group norms even when such norms differed in their prevalence (e.g., drinking juice out of bowls instead of cups; Study 1) or in their valence (e.g., giving people punches instead of flowers; Study 2). In Study 1, disapproval toward nonconformity varied as a function of the norm's prevalence and of participant age. In Study 2, both children and adults approved of conformity to positive norms and disapproved of conformity to negative norms (e.g., "If Glerks make babies cry, an individual Glerk should not"). Nevertheless, across studies, descriptive-to-prescriptive reasoning played a role. In Study 1, participants evaluated nonconformity to common norms as worse than conformity to uncommon norms (even though both cases involved uncommon behavior), and they evaluated nonconformity to uncommon norms as worse than conformity to common norms (even though both cases involved common behavior). In Study 2, participants evaluated nonconformity to positive norms as worse than conformity to negative norms (even though both cases involved negative behavior), and they evaluated nonconformity to negative norms as worse than conformity to positive norms (even though both cases involved positive behavior). Together, these data highlight the limits (and scope) of descriptive-to-prescriptive reasoning and suggest that when children (and adults) evaluate the appropriateness of someone's behavior, they consider not only the behavior, but also, the norms of the group. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Malle B.F., Chi V.B.

We present a broad notion of norms that can accommodate many of its interdisciplinary variants and offers a framework to ask questions about norm change. Rather than examining community norm change, we focus on changes in the individual's norm representations. These representations can be characterized by six properties (including as context specificity, deontic force, prevalence), and we examine which of the properties change as a result of norm learning and norm teaching. We first review research insights into norm learning based on observation, imitation, and various forms of inference. Then we examine norm learning that results from teaching, specifically teaching by modeling and demonstration, communication and instruction, and evaluative feedback. We finally speculate about how different kinds of norm change in a given community foster different kinds of norm learning in the individual community member.