Social cognition - RICHMOND

Question 1

 How researchers measure judgements that children make about social world

Answer 1

• Similar to self preferences (e.g. food pref, clothing pref)
o Kids more likely to pick doll if wearing same
o Toy preference less w sticker more w toy
o Less w shirt colour and more w hair colour
• How salience the preference was + similar pref

Question 2

 Alt explanations

Answer 2

• Social evaluation explantion- infants perceive helps as good, hinderers as bad.  unlearned
• ALT: association explanation- helper have bouncing (positive), collision (aversive)

Question 3

 Many babies movement and attempts to measure reproducibility in infant research

Answer 3

• Original study – might’ve overestimated true effect size of infants preference of helpers OR might’ve had methodological issues that affected replication
• Controlled w puppet show
• Randomly assigned, social and control conditions Habituation phase > choice phase

Question 4

Many babies exclusion criteria

Answer 4

Not full term
diagnosed developmental disorders
failure to set a habituation criteria
failure to look during critical period
parent/outside inference
experimental or experimenter error

Question 5

Many babies discussion

Answer 5

• Results
o Chose helper

• if the findings are replicable, why previous replication attempts might have failed (and may fail again), and what the findings might mean (rich vs. lean interpretations):
o Minimally, these behaviours show that infants can discriminate helping/hindering actions, distinguish them from perceptually similar non-social actions, and selectively make a choice based on this.
o At a higher-level, these behaviours may support the hypothesis that socio-moral cognition, similar to other conceptual domains (e.g., objects, number), is a core aspect of human cognition

Question 6

• Replication is key to scientific progress in that it:

Answer 6

(1) establishes the accuracy of a finding
(2) examines the condtiions under which the finding is observed
(3) approximates the finding’s true, underlying effect size