Costly Social Commitments in Early Childhood

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how children understand and navigate costly social commitments, addressing open questions about the developmental origins of participation in the social contract. Across three empirical chapters, this work examines how children reason about actions for the greater good, how they expect others to follow belief-based norms, and how likely they are to follow these norms themselves.Chapter 2 examines how 6- to 9-year-olds weigh personal cost and collective consequences when reasoning about the greater good. Acting for the greater good often requires paying a personal cost to benefit the collective. Of interest is how children weigh these trade-offs. Across two studies using novel vignettes about a fictional community, children learned that individuals could incur either minor or major costs to prevent minor or major harms to the group. Children were asked to predict how many agents would act and to judge cases in which an agent refused to act. In Study 1, children expected more agents to pay a minor cost to prevent a major harm and judged refusals as less permissible in this condition. In Study 2, cost and consequence were independently manipulated. Children predicted that agents would pay a minor cost regardless of the consequences and a major cost only when the consequences were major. However, their moral evaluations were driven primarily by consequences: refusals to act were judged less permissible when they led to major harms than when they led to minor harms, regardless of cost. Together, these findings suggest that children engage in principled cost-benefit reasoning about costly action for the greater good. Both costs and consequences inform expectations about when others will act, while consequences play a particularly central role in determining when inaction is morally permissible. Chapter 3 examines whether young children understand that shared beliefs can function as socially regulated norms. Groups can form around shared beliefs, and as a result, these beliefs can take on normative force. To adhere to group norms, members of belief-based groups may be expected to maintain their beliefs, even when doing so is costly. In this study, 4- to 6-year-old children learned about a character who belonged to a belief-based group that required endorsing a specific causal claim, and about a contrasting “free-thinking” group with no belief-based norms. After observing strong counterevidence to the group’s claim, children predicted whether the character would revise or maintain their initial belief. They also evaluated how the character would act when competing motivations conflicted with belief-based norms. Children expected members of belief-based groups to maintain their beliefs, accept personal costs to publicly endorse group-aligned claims, and face exclusion when they publicly rejected group beliefs. At the same time, they judged it appropriate to privately share disconfirming evidence with a teammate. Together, these findings suggest that by early childhood, children anticipate that others will sometimes prioritize ideological commitments over epistemic accuracy, even when doing so is costly. Chapter 4 embeds 4- to 5-year-olds directly in a belief-based group to test whether they adhere to the norms they endorsed in their third-party judgments. Children first endorsed a causal hypothesis and were then inducted into a team whose members shared that belief. Crucially, the requirements for group membership varied across conditions. In the focal Belief-contingent condition, children learned that team membership required maintaining the shared belief. In comparison conditions, teammates shared the belief, but membership depended instead on an incidental trait or on having made the same initial guess; in either case, maintaining the belief was not necessary for continued group membership. Afterward, children observed unambiguous evidence that their initial endorsement was incorrect. Across two studies, children reliably updated their beliefs when their group did not impose belief-based norms. However, they were markedly more likely to persist in their original, now-disconfirmed belief when it was central to team membership. This resistance to revision held even when teammates were absent, suggesting that belief maintenance was not driven solely by immediate reputational concerns. Together, these findings indicate that the affiliative power of ideology has early developmental roots. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that by early childhood, children integrate considerations of cost, consequences, and group norms when reasoning about social obligations. They further reveal that children understand beliefs as socially regulated commitments and apply belief-based norms to others and themselves. More broadly, this work provides a developmental account of how tensions between epistemic goals and affiliative motives emerge.