Children’s inferences about relationships from the way people explain behavior.
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: When people explain someone’s behavior, they can frame it as a property of the individual (e.g., “Rowan likes to play with bugs” ) or as a propertyof the group the individual belongs to (e.g., “Wugs like to play with bugs” ). Adults are sensitive to these framing diff erences and use them to inferthe speaker’s relationship to the target — people infer social intimacy from individual-level explanations as opposed to group-level explanationsor person-level explanations (Thomas et al., in prep) We ask whether children ages 5 to 8 years reason similarly. Specifi cally, we test whether children infer social closeness from individual-basedexplanations, compared to group-based explanations. We contrast this with inferences about hierarchical relationships. We also manipulatewhether the speaker already knew the information about the person or seems to be learning it (“Hmm…must” vs. “Yes…”). Adults do notdistinguish between these cases suggesting that they think about it as a kind of attention.
Source: OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints)
Author: Ashley J. Thomas
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213831907