Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T21:54:37.518Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The selective social learner as an agent of cultural group selection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Sarah Suárez
Affiliation:
Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55436. suare062@umn.edumkoenig@umn.eduhttp://www.cehd.umn.edu/icd/people/faculty/cpsy/koenig.html
Melissa Koenig
Affiliation:
Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55436. suare062@umn.edumkoenig@umn.eduhttp://www.cehd.umn.edu/icd/people/faculty/cpsy/koenig.html

Abstract

Developmental research characterizes even the youngest learners as critical and selective, capable of preserving or culling cultural information on the bases of informant accuracy, reasoning, or coherence. We suggest that Richerson et al. adjust their account of social learning in cultural group selection (CGS) by taking into consideration the role of the selective learner in the cultural inheritance system.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Corriveau, K. H., Chen, E. E. & Harris, P. L. (2014) Judgments about fact and fiction by children from religious and nonreligious backgrounds. Cognitive Science 39(2):353–82.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Corriveau, K. H. & Harris, P. L. (2009) Preschoolers continue to trust a more accurate informant 1 week after exposure to accuracy information. Developmental Science 12(1):188–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corriveau, K. H., Kinzler, K. D. & Harris, P. L. (2013) Accuracy trumps accent in children's endorsement of object labels. Developmental psychology 49(3):470.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Corriveau, K. H., Pickard, K. & Harris, P. L. (2011) Preschoolers trust particular informants when learning new names and new morphological forms. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 29(1):4663.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Doebel, S., Koenig, M. A. & Rowell, S. (2011) Young children detect logical inconsistency. Poster presented at the 2011 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, March 31–April 2, 2011.Google Scholar
Gliga, T. & Csibra, G. (2009) One-year-old infants appreciate the referential nature of deictic gestures and words. Psychological Science 20(3):347–53.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hodges, B. H. (2014) Rethinking conformity and imitation: divergence, convergence, and social understanding. Frontiers in Psychology: Cognitive Science 5, Article No. 726. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00726.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jaswal, V. K. (2010) Believing what you're told: Young children's trust in unexpected testimony about the physical world. Cognitive Psychology 61(3):248–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jaswal, V. K., Croft, A. C., Setia, A. R. & Cole, C. A. (2010) Young children have a specific, highly robust bias to trust testimony. Psychological Science 21(10):1541–47.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jaswal, V. K. & Neely, L. A. (2006) Adults don't always know best: Preschoolers use past reliability over age when learning new words. Psychological Science 17:757–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Koenig, M. A. & Echols, C. H. (2003) Infants' understanding of false labeling events: The referential roles of words and the speakers who use them. Cognition 87(3):179208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koenig, M. A. & Harris, P. L. (2005) Preschoolers mistrust ignorant and inaccurate speakers. Child Development 76(6):1261–77.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Koenig, M. A. & Jaswal, V. K. (2011) Characterizing children's expectations about expertise and incompetence: Halo or pitchfork effects? Child Development 82(5):1634–47.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Koenig, M. A. & Stephens, E., (2014) Characterizing children's responsiveness to cues of speaker trustworthiness: Two proposals. In: Trust and skepticism: Children's selective learning from testimony, ed. Robinson, E. & Einav, S., pp. 1327. Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Koenig, M. A. & Woodward, A. L. (2010) Sensitivity of 24-month-olds to the prior inaccuracy of the source: Possible mechanisms. Developmental Psychology 46(4):815–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mercier, H. & Sperber, D. (2011) Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34(2):5774.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Reifen Tagar, M., Federico, C. M., Lyons, K. E., Ludeke, S. & Koenig, M. A. (2014) Heralding the authoritarian? Orientation toward authority in early childhood. Psychological Science 25(4):883–92.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sabbagh, M. A. & Shafman, D. (2009) How children block learning from ignorant speakers. Cognition 112:415–22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Scofield, J., Gilpin, A. T., Pierucci, J. & Morgan, R. (2013) Matters of accuracy and conventionality: Prior accuracy guides children's evaluations of others' actions. Developmental psychology 49(3):432.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Seston, R. & Kelemen, D. (2014) Children's conformity when acquiring novel conventions: The case of artifacts. Journal of Cognition and Development 15(4):569–83.Google Scholar
Shtulman, A. & Carey, S. (2007) Improbable or impossible? How children reason about the possibility of extraordinary events. Child Development 78(3):1015–32.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sobel, D. M. & Kushnir, T. (2013) Knowledge matters: How children evaluate the reliability of testimony as a process of rational inference. Psychological Review 120(4):779–97.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sobel, D. M. & Macris, D. M. (2013) Children's understanding of speaker reliability between lexical and syntactic knowledge. Developmental Psychology 49(3):523–32.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stephens, E. & Koenig, M. (2015) Varieties of testimony: Children's selective learning in semantic and episodic domains. Cognition 137:182–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stephens, E., Suárez, S. & Koenig, M.A. (2015) Early testimonial learning: Monitoring speech acts and speakers. Advances in Child Development and Behavior 48:151–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wilks, M., Collier-Baker, E. & Nielsen, M. (2015) Preschool children favor copying a successful individual over an unsuccessful group. Developmental Science 18(6):1014–24. doi: 10.1111/desc.12274.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Woolley, J. D. & E Ghossainy, M. (2013) Revisiting the fantasy–reality distinction: Children as naïve skeptics. Child Development 84(5):1496–510.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed