Children use epistemic states flexibly to make diagnostic social inferences.

Abstract

Children are sensitive to their own and others' epistemic states and use these to guide their learning and communication. Here, we systematically examined children's use of epistemic states to make diagnostic social inferences. Specifically, we investigated children's group membership inferences based on what others do and do not know and what role children's own knowledge states and the type of knowledge play in these inferences. Across two preregistered studies, 7-and 8-year-old children (N = 100) were shown targets who were knowledgeable (Study 1) or ignorant (Study 2) of familiar and unfamiliar knowledge items that were either general or culture-specific and asked to guess whether the targets would be linguistic ingroup or outgroup members. Children inferred that the targets would speak their native language if they shared targets' epistemic states and a foreign language if they did not. Importantly, these patterns were particularly evident when epistemic states involved cultural knowledge. Further, children's inferences became more nuanced with age. These findings suggest that others' knowledge states are socially meaningful in childhood and children use their own and others' epistemic states in flexible ways to guide their diagnostic social judgments. Public Significance StatementWhat people do and do not know is significantly shaped by their past social history. We show that 7-and 8-year-old children are sensitive to this and use their own and others' knowledge as well as ignorance to identify people's social groups. We also show that children especially use culture-specific knowledge such as knowledge about food and music in their social inferences.

Traces of our past: the social representation of the physical world

“…Our ability to reason about copying and the social transmission of ideas may allow us to trace socio-cultural history, inferring who has had contact with whom from 'suspicious similarities' in the artifacts they create or know about. In this way, children use knowledge of culturally-specific artifacts like food and musical instruments (but not general world knowledge) to infer others' social affiliations and cultural groups (Öner & Soley, 2023).…”