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  • Publication
    Accès libre
    How Preschoolers Associate Power with Gender in Male-Female Interactions: A Cross-Cultural Investigation
    (2020-1-6)
    Charafeddine, Rawan
    ;
    Zambrana, Imac M.
    ;
    Triniol, Benoit
    ;
    Mercier, Hugo 
    ;
    Clément, Fabrice 
    ;
    Kaufmann, Laurence
    ;
    Reboul, Anne
    ;
    Pons, Francisco
    ;
    Van der Henst, Jean-Baptiste
    Interactions between males and females often display a power imbalance. Men tend to adopt more dominant physical postures, lead conversations more, and are more likely to impose their will on women than vice versa. Furthermore, social representations typically associate males with a higher power than females. However, little is known about how those representations emerge in early childhood. The present study investigated whether preschool children from different countries assign more power to males than to females in the context of mixed-gender interactions. In Experiments 1a (n = 148) and 1b (n = 403), which implemented power through body postures, 4–6 year-old children from France, Lebanon, and Norway strongly associated power with a male character. Experiment 2 (n = 160) showed that although both French boys and girls identified themselves more with a dominant than with a subordinate posture, girls were less likely to do so in a mixed-gender context. In Experiment 3 (n = 213), which no longer used body postures, boys from Lebanon and France attributed more decision power and resource control to a male puppet than did girls. By investigating gender representations through interactions, the present study shows that children associate gender and power at an early age.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Confidence as an expression of commitment: why misplaced expressions of confidence backfire
    (2017-1-20)
    Vullioud, Colin
    ;
    Clément, Fabrice 
    ;
    Scott-Philipps, Thom
    ;
    Mercier, Hugo 
    Because communication can be abused by senders, it is not inherently stable. One way of stabilizing communication is for senders to commit to their messages. If a sender is committed to a message, she is willing to incur a cost (direct or reputational) if the message is found to be unreliable. This cost provides a reason for receivers to accept messages to which senders are committed. We suggest that expressions of confidence can be used as commitment signals: messages expressed more confidently commit their senders more. On this basis, we make three predictions: that confidently expressed messages are more persuasive (H1’, already well established), that senders whose messages were accepted due to the senders' confidence but were then found to be unreliable should incur costs (H2’), and that if a message is accepted for reasons other than confidence, when it is found to be unreliable the sender should incur lower reputational costs than if the message had been accepted on the basis of the sender's confidence (H3’). A review of the literature revealed broadly supportive but still ambiguous evidence for H2’ and no tests of H3’. In experiments 1, 2, and 3 (testing H2’) participants received the same advice from two senders, one being confident and the other unconfident. Participants were more likely to follow the advice of the confident sender, but once the advice was revealed to have been misguided, participants adjusted their trust so that they trusted the initially unconfident sender more than the confident sender. In experiments 3 and 4 (testing H3’) participants chose between either two senders differing in confidence or two senders differing in competence. Participants followed the advice of the confident sender and of the competent sender. When it was revealed that the advice was misguided, the confident sender suffered from a larger drop in trust than the competent sender. These results are relevant for communicative theories of overconfidence.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Children’s allocation of resources in social dominance situations
    (2016-12-20)
    Cherafeddine, Rawan
    ;
    Mercier, Hugo 
    ;
    Kaufmann, Laurence
    ;
    Clément, Fabrice 
    ;
    Reboul, Anne
    ;
    Van der Henst, Jean-Baptiste
    Two experiments with preschoolers (36 to 78 months) and 8-year-old children (Experiment 1, N = 173; Experiment 2, N = 132) investigated the development of children’s resource distribution in dominance contexts. On the basis of the distributive justice literature, 2 opposite predictions were tested. Children could match resource allocation with the unequal social setting they observe and thus favor a dominant individual over a subordinate 1. Alternatively, children could choose to compensate the subordinate if they consider that the dominance asymmetry should be counteracted. Two experiments using a giving task (Experiment 1) and a taking task (Experiment 2) led to the same results. In both experiments, children took dominance into account when allocating resources. Moreover, their distributive decisions were similarly affected by age: Although 3- and 4-year-old children favored the dominant individual, 5-year-old children showed no preference and 8-year-old children strongly favored the subordinate. Several mechanisms accounting for this developmental pattern are discussed.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Children's allocation of resources in social dominance situations
    (2016-11-26)
    Cherafeddine, Rawan
    ;
    Mercier, Hugo 
    ;
    Clément, Fabrice 
    ;
    Kaufmann, Laurence
    ;
    Reboul, Anne
    ;
    Van der Henst, Jean-Baptiste
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Wishful Thinking in Preschoolers
    (2016-1-1)
    Bernard, Stephane 
    ;
    Clément, Fabrice 
    ;
    Mercier, Hugo 
    The current experiment sought to demonstrate the presence of wishful thinking—when wishes influence beliefs—in young children. A sample of 77 preschoolers needed to predict, eight times in a row, which of two plastic eggs, one containing one toy and the other containing three toys, would be drawn by a blinded experimenter. On the four trials in which the children could not keep the content of the egg drawn, they were equally likely to predict that either egg would be drawn. By contrast, on the four trials in which the children got to keep the content of the egg, they were more likely to predict that the egg with three toys would be drawn. Any effort the children exerted would be the same across condi- tions, so that this demonstration of wishful thinking cannot be accounted for by an effort heuristic. One group of children—a sub- group of the 5-year-olds—did not engage in wishful thinking. Children from this subgroup instead used the representativeness heuristic to guide their answers. This result suggests that having an explicit representation of the outcome inhibits children from engaging in wishful thinking in the same way as explicit representations constrain the operation of motivated reasoning in adults.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    How Preschoolers Use Cues of Dominance to Make Sense of Their Social Environment
    (2015-3-23)
    Cheraffedine, Rawan
    ;
    Mercier, Hugo 
    ;
    Clément, Fabrice 
    ;
    Kaufmann, Laurence
    ;
    Berchtold, André
    ;
    Reboul, Anne
    ;
    Van der Henst, Jean-Baptiste
    A series of four experiments investigated preschoolers’ abilities to make sense of dominance relations. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that as early as 3 years old, preschoolers are able to infer dominance not only from physical supremacy but also from decision power, age, and resources. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that preschoolers have expectations regarding the ways in which a dominant and a subordinate individual are likely to differ. In particular, they expect that an individual who imposes his choice on another will exhibit higher competence in games and will have more resources.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Early sensitivity to arguments: How preschoolers weight circular arguments
    (2014)
    Mercier, Hugo 
    ;
    Bernard, Stephane 
    ;
    Clément, Fabrice 
    Observational studies suggest that children as young as 2 years can evaluate some of the arguments people offer them. However, experimental studies of sensitivity to different arguments have not yet targeted children younger than 5 years. The current study aimed at bridging this gap by testing the ability of preschoolers (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) to weight arguments. To do so, it focused on a common type of fallacy?circularity?to which 5-year-olds are sensitive. The current experiment asked children?and, as a group control, adults?to choose between the contradictory opinions of two speakers. In the first task, participants of all age groups favored an opinion supported by a strong argument over an opinion supported by a circular argument. In the second task, 4- and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds or adults, favored the opinion supported by a circular argument over an unsupported opinion. We suggest that the results of these tasks in 3- to 5-year-olds are best interpreted as resulting from the combination of two mechanisms: (a) basic skills of argument evaluations that process the content of arguments, allowing children as young as 3 years to favor non-circular arguments over circular arguments, and (b) a heuristic that leads older children (4- and 5-year-olds) to give some weight to circular arguments, possibly by interpreting these arguments as a cue to speaker dominance.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    The power of well-connected arguments: Early sensitivity to the connective because.
    (2012)
    Bernard, Stephane 
    ;
    Mercier, Hugo 
    ;
    Clément, Fabrice 
    Connectives, such as because, are routinely used by parents when addressing their children, yet we do not know to what extent children are sensitive to their use. Given children's early developing abilities to evaluate testimony and produce arguments containing connectives, it was hypothesized that young children would show an appropriate reaction to the presence of connectives. Three experiments were conducted to test this hypothesis. In each, two informants gave contradicting statements regarding the location of an object and justified their positions by using a similar argument. Only one of the informants used the connective because to link his argument to the statement. In each experiment, the 3-year-olds performed at chance in selecting choices containing the connective because, but the 4- and 5-year-olds performed above chance. Moreover, in Experiments 2 and 3, the 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults performed significantly better than the 3-year-olds. These findings show that 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults are sensitive to the presence of connectives. An interpretation of the difference in performance between the 3-year-olds and the 4- and 5-year-olds in terms of metarepresentational skills is suggested.