Neuroscience
The playground sight of a group friends rejecting a lone child betrays an ugly side of human nature. An intriguing new cross-cultural study has examined the development of reasoning about social rejection in young children and teenagers, revealing a surprising level of sophistication.
Yoonjung Park and Melanie Killen found that by age ten, children in the USA and South Korea already consider rejecting a peer based on their nationality or gender to be morally worse than peer rejection based on the behavioural traits of aggressiveness or shyness. The children seem to recognise that people can be expected, to a certain extent, to modify their behaviour, but are unable (and shouldn't be expected) to alter their gender or nationality.
The researchers presented 397 Korean children and 333 US children, aged 10 to 13, with fictional scenarios involving peer rejection and victimisation in different contexts (group rejection and one-on-one friendship rejection) and for different reasons (for their shy or aggressive behaviour, their nationality or their gender). The children were asked to say how acceptable each form of rejection was and to justify their answers.
The results were consistent with 'social domain theory' because the reasons the children gave depended on the context. The children tended to cite moral reasons (e.g. 'he may get hurt in his mind') when explaining their condemnation of peer rejection based on nationality and gender. By contrast, rejection based on behavioural traits (shyness or aggressiveness) was justified or condemned based on grounds of social-convention and personal choice. For example, one of the children answered that 'if he [the fictional child doing the rejecting] doesn't want to be friends with the kid, it's okay. It's his choice'; others referred to the disruption likely to be caused by an aggressive person entering the group.
Overall, the older children actually perceived peer rejection as more acceptable than the younger children, perhaps because children come to value autonomy and personal choice more as they get older. However, this increased acceptance was not true across all contexts. For example, rejection because of nationality was seen as less acceptable by older children.
There were few cultural differences. The exceptions were that the US kids were more willing to accept rejection of aggressive peers, perhaps because aggression is more rife in US society. The Korean kids, meanwhile, were more tolerant of rejection based on nationality. This might reflect the fact that the Seoul-based Korean sample were ethnically homogenous whereas the Washington DC-based US sample were more ethnically diverse.
Park and Killen called on future research to explore children's reasoning about peer rejection in other cultures and to involve different contexts and reasons for rejection. 'Drawing on findings regarding children's social understanding, evaluation, and reasoning about peer rejection to design programmes to ameliorate the negative long-term consequences of peer rejection will go a long way towards reducing the social deviance and facilitating social tolerance and inclusion in multiple contexts and across cultures,' they said.
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Park, Y., and Killen, M. (2010). When is peer rejection justifiable? Children's understanding across two cultures. Cognitive Development, 25 (3), 290-301 DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2009.10.004
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Children's reasoning about when it's okay to reject their peers
Yoonjung Park and Melanie Killen found that by age ten, children in the USA and South Korea already consider rejecting a peer based on their nationality or gender to be morally worse than peer rejection based on the behavioural traits of aggressiveness or shyness. The children seem to recognise that people can be expected, to a certain extent, to modify their behaviour, but are unable (and shouldn't be expected) to alter their gender or nationality.
The researchers presented 397 Korean children and 333 US children, aged 10 to 13, with fictional scenarios involving peer rejection and victimisation in different contexts (group rejection and one-on-one friendship rejection) and for different reasons (for their shy or aggressive behaviour, their nationality or their gender). The children were asked to say how acceptable each form of rejection was and to justify their answers.
The results were consistent with 'social domain theory' because the reasons the children gave depended on the context. The children tended to cite moral reasons (e.g. 'he may get hurt in his mind') when explaining their condemnation of peer rejection based on nationality and gender. By contrast, rejection based on behavioural traits (shyness or aggressiveness) was justified or condemned based on grounds of social-convention and personal choice. For example, one of the children answered that 'if he [the fictional child doing the rejecting] doesn't want to be friends with the kid, it's okay. It's his choice'; others referred to the disruption likely to be caused by an aggressive person entering the group.
Overall, the older children actually perceived peer rejection as more acceptable than the younger children, perhaps because children come to value autonomy and personal choice more as they get older. However, this increased acceptance was not true across all contexts. For example, rejection because of nationality was seen as less acceptable by older children.
There were few cultural differences. The exceptions were that the US kids were more willing to accept rejection of aggressive peers, perhaps because aggression is more rife in US society. The Korean kids, meanwhile, were more tolerant of rejection based on nationality. This might reflect the fact that the Seoul-based Korean sample were ethnically homogenous whereas the Washington DC-based US sample were more ethnically diverse.
Park and Killen called on future research to explore children's reasoning about peer rejection in other cultures and to involve different contexts and reasons for rejection. 'Drawing on findings regarding children's social understanding, evaluation, and reasoning about peer rejection to design programmes to ameliorate the negative long-term consequences of peer rejection will go a long way towards reducing the social deviance and facilitating social tolerance and inclusion in multiple contexts and across cultures,' they said.
_________________________________
Park, Y., and Killen, M. (2010). When is peer rejection justifiable? Children's understanding across two cultures. Cognitive Development, 25 (3), 290-301 DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2009.10.004Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Young children in northeastern USA see harms against the environment as morally worse than bad manners. And asked to explain this judgment, many of them referred to the moral standing of nature itself - displaying so-called "biocentric" reasoning. This...
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Would you lie for the sake of your team? Perhaps it depends on the culture you come from. Monica Sweet at the University of California and her co-researchers reasoned that children from collectivist cultures, such as China, which emphasise the importance...
- Realistic View Of Their Popularity Protects Children Against Effects Of Social Rejection
Human immodesty knows no bounds. Most people think they're better looking than average, more intelligent, better at driving and less likely to get ill. Psychologists seeking to explain this common delusion have suggested it serves a protective role:...
- The 'pain' Of Rejection
"From the Archives", first published in the Digest 10.11.03. When rock group REM sing "everybody hurts sometimes" they are, of course, referring to the inevitability of emotional anguish rather than our shared need to occasionally reach for the paracetemol....
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Undergraduate Research Assistants Social and Moral Development Laboratory Dr. Melanie Killen https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-WK1jWUo8h2UVlvbWNFeU1tQ2M/view?usp=sharing Description: The Social and Moral Development Laboratory has several active research...