October
31st and November 2nd, 2000
compiled by Jonathan, with notes from
Prof. Elman and Nicoletta.
What
does the study of social development involve?
-effects
of social environment on learning (e.g. do girls do better in all-girl
schools?)
-children's
reasoning about the beliefs of others (e.g. are inferences about self made the
same way as inferences about others?)
Independent
variables (causal variables) studied in social development:
-parenting
style, family structure, amount and type of television watched, amount and type
of day-care, beliefs of peers, birth order (usually minimal effects for birth
order, Pop psychological beliefs notwithstanding)
Dependent
variables (effects) studied in social development:
-moral
development (when does hitting become a worse no-no than eating with hands?),
achievement motivation (tendency to perservere vs. give up), social competence
(negotiating, taking other's perspective) antisocial behavior, gender beliefs
and roles (e.g. why do some girls wish to be especially 'feminine,' and others
less so?)
Example
questions, that a social developmentalist would study:
-how
do parenting styles affect children social competence?
-what
are the effects of watching TV?
-what
kinds of custody arrangements are best for children?
-how
do children's early relationships effects or later relationships (attachment
theory: a good relationship with Mom predicts later success in
relationships. Note the possible
correlation-cause fallacy here.)
Implications
of social developmental research…
-for
parenting practices: what forms of discipline are best; what rules should be
made about TV?
-for
teaching practices: how best to teach academic and social skills?
-for
public policy: how should courts treat custody disputes; what age is best for
adoption?
Why
is studying social development difficult?
-different
individuals may respond differently to the same thing. (E.g., the experience of abuse may lead one
individual to be a victim, another to victimize; one individual to become more
empathetic, another to become insensitive.)
-effects
may differ based on "small", hard to measure, things. (E.g., parents' attitude towards day-care
may be more important than day-care itself.)
-exerting
experimental control is difficult, making it hard to verify causal hypotheses
(e.g. does TV itself, or some other cause which leads to TV, cause a certain
result?).
Milestones
in early social development: an approximate timeline. Note that there is great variability between
children, and that the order of these milestones is more predictable than
precisely when they take place.
newborn:
imitation of some facial expression, preference for mothers voice, smell of
mother recognized
9 months: other people are understood to be intentional, and to be influenceable -- gaze alternation between social partner and object ('I want it; get it for me'), first social referencing (baby looks at others to find out if an object is safe, and responds differently to a smile than to an expression of alarm)
12
months: attachment pattern with one or more caregivers (cries when person
leaves), attempts to hurt or comfort others
18
months: first understanding of individual desire (not everyone likes
broccoli/Goldfish crackers), beginning of gender-stereotyped preferences (e.g.
boys prefer trucks)
2
years: interest in expressing independence (picking clothes to wear, dressing
self), the emergence of private speech (talking to oneself while doing
something), turn-taking with peers begins
3 years: preference for same-sex playmates, hiding of emotion (depending on child and on culture)
4
years: understanding of false belief (' even though at first I believe that the
crayon box has crayons in it, it might have candy in it'), gender stability is
understood (once a girl, always a girl), aggression becomes more verbal, rather
than physical
5
years: gender constancy (if you're a boy, wearing a dress doesn't make your a
girl), understanding real vs. apparent emotion (3-year-olds can fake emotion,
but five-year-olds can recognize when others fake emotion)
6
years: understanding of complex emotions, rather than simply happy/sad (pride,
shame, guilt), emotional responds to situations vary depending on who's
responsible for them
|
|
High acceptance: parents
express love frequently |
low acceptance: parents are aloof and critical |
|
High control: parents actively
monitor behavior |
Authoritative -best grades, self-confidence,
altruism |
Authoritarian -academic problems, peer
problems, subdued |
|
Low control |
Permissive -to aggressive, immature with
peers, not independent |
Neglectful -most consistent negative
outcomes: antisocial behavior, academic problems |
Parenting
style
and children's outcomes:
*:
are these findings culturally dependent?
(Best results with authoritarian parents in African-American community.)
…But
what causes parenting style, and children's eventual outcomes?
-to
what degree to children affect parenting style
-do
third variables, apart from parents choices of parenting style and apart from
their children, actually lead to these outcomes (e.g. genetic effects)
-it
seems that children and parents both influence parenting style
Divorce. Almost half of American children will spend
some time a single parent home; in 90 percent of these cases it will be with
their mother. What effect does divorce
have on children?
-usually
a crisis period of a year or more: wife angry and lonely, husband feels shutoff
from children, new financial pressures
-custodial
mothers tend to become less sensitive to their children
-children
often have increased problems with peers and academic work.
-effects
tend to be worse for boys. Perhaps
girls internalize problems more; or, perhaps not having a same-sex parent is
responsible for boys' worse outcome
Long-term
effects:
-emotional
and behavioral problems
-preschoolers
have more short-term trouble
-older
children have more long-term trouble
Ways
to mitigate effects of divorce
-child
has friends with divorce parents
-parents
limit negative interaction with each other
-family
has outside social support
-child
stays in contact with the noncustodial parent
Questions
of causality, and of interpretation:
-most
studies of divorce use happy two-parent families for comparison. Comparing with similarly unhappy two-parent families leads to
reduced estimation of the effects of divorce itself, per se.
-thus
the foundational questions may not be "what are the effects of
divorce?", but rather "what are the causes of unhappy
marriages/families that, among other things, tend to lead to divorce?".
-children
have some effect, as do third variables
Social cognitive development (Nov. 2nd,
2000)
-focus
on children's reasoning about people
-examines
implications of children's beliefs
-example
question: are children's reasoning about people different from their reasoning
about objects?
"Outcomes
may depend crucially on how children think about their experiences."
Achievement
motivation patterns:
-helplessness
(negative affect, lack of persistence, self-blame)
-mastery-oriented
(neutral or positive affect, persistence and focus on strategy)
Beliefs
about intelligence (before Gail Heyman's research):
-entity
belief (you can learn new things, but you can change how smart you are. These people are vulnerable when problems
arise)
-incremental
belief -- you can do a lot to change how smart you are
Helplessness
and trait beliefs in children: Before Gail Heyman's research:
-over
age eight: entity beliefs were associated with helplessness
-under
age eight, children were thought to not exhibit helplessness, and to not
understand the idea of stable traits
Heyman's
research demonstrated helplessness in kindergartners (Heyman, Dweck & Cane,
1992).
-children
enacted stories in which they made a mistake, were given explicit feedback that
they had made a mistake, and were asked to respond to that feedback
-even
young children, with this methodology, showed characteristics of helplessness
-a
key result was that belief in stable traits was associated with a helpless
response. Hence, Heyman looked more
closely at trait beliefs
Previous
research on trait beliefs in children suggested that before age eight, children
did not understand the idea of personality traits.
-free
description paradigm: children were asked to "tell me about your
mother/father/friend." Before age
eight, descriptions thus obtained are fairly superficial.
-prediction
paradigm: children are given descriptions of a trait-relevant behavior, and
asked to predict future behavior: "Yesterday, Jimmy shared his apple at
lunchtime. This afternoon, Sarah will
ask him to help her rake leaves. Will
he help her?" Again, before about
age eight, children do not seem to use the trait-relevant information to
predict future behavior.
A
new method, examining traits in relation to mental states, demonstrated trait
beliefs in children as young as five.
Specifically:
the
same behavior may mean different things about an individual's traits, depending
on his motivation for that behavior.
-in
one experiment, children were told that a person had taken candy away from a
baby. The child in the experiment then
had to infer why the person took away the candy: did they want to prevent the
baby from choking, or did they want to eat the candy themselves?
-or,
children were given an example where a person offered to help another
person. Children had to infer whether
the helper's goal was actually to help, or merely to make the other person feel
incompetent.
What
factors affect trait inferences?
-both
boys and girls make more negative inferences about boys (see below)
-noun
labels make a trait seen as more stable (see below)
In
one study, second and third graders were shown pictures of four unfamiliar
girls and four unfamiliar boys.
Each
of the eight children pictured was said to have exhibited an ambiguous behavior. For instance, "this girl asks lots and
lots of questions."
Study
participants chose between three possible explanations of the ambiguous
behavior. For instance, the girl being
pictured might:
-be
interested in learning new things (a positive trait),
-like
to annoy people (and negative trait), and
-be
in a new situation and not know what to do (neutral).
Results
show that both boys and girls made more negative inferences when boys performed
an ambiguous action. A surprising
finding is that this result held for boys, even though boys like other boys
more than they like girls.
Another
study (Carrot Eaters and Creature Believers -- Gelman & Heyman, 1999;
reprinted in the course reader), considered the effects of using a noun label to describe a trait. Subjects were children 5- to 7- years old.
-children
were told about the characteristics of a hypothetical person, for instance,
"Rose eat a lot of carrots."
-then,
some children heard a noun label for the hypothetical character, for instance,
"she [Rose] is a carrot-eater"; whereas
-some
children heard another verbal predicate instead, "she eats carrots
whenever she can."
Results:
using a noun label ("Rose is a carrot-eater") to describe a trait led
to the trait being judged as
-more
stable over time (Rose ate a lot of carrots when she was four years old; Rose
will eat a lot of carrots when she's grown up), and
-more
stable in a variety of contexts (e.g. Rose would eat a lot of carrots if she
grew up in a family where no one liked carrots; and Rose would eat a lot of
carrots even if her family try to stop her from eating carrots.)
---end---