{"pk":27317,"title":"Pragmatics Influence Children’s Use of Majority Information","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Do children always conform to a majority’s testimony, or do\nthe pragmatics of that testimony matter? We investigate\nchildren’s reasoning about mapping a novel word to a referent\nin an object-labeling task. Across four conditions, we\nmodified the testimony in an object-labeling task, to account\nfor pragmatic principles, so that the majority does and does\nnot provide an explicit opinion about the alternative object\nchosen by the minority. Four- and 5-year-olds were given a\nchoice between an object endorsed by a three-person\nmajority, or one endorsed by a single minority informant. In\nthe unendorsed condition, informants explicitly unendorsed\nthe unchosen object. In the nothing condition, informants said\nnothing about the unchosen object. In the ignorance\ncondition, informants explicitly expressed uncertainty about\nthe unchosen object, and in the hidden condition, the chosen\nobject was the only one present at the time of the\nendorsement. Children were most likely to endorse the\nmajority object in the unendorsed condition, in which the\nmajority explicitly stated that the label applied to only one\nreferent, whereas in the hidden condition, where only one\nobject at a time was present in the discourse, children chose\nobjects endorsed by the majority and the minority equally,\nwith the other two conditions intermediate. This suggests that\nchildren might not simply have a conformity bias; rather, they\nare sensitive to the majority’s implied intentions when\nlearning from testimony.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"social learning; social cognition; consensus;\ntestimony; causal reasoning; pragmatics"}],"section":"Posters: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1rt8m9qk","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Theresa","middle_name":"","last_name":"Pham","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Toronto","department":""},{"first_name":"Jane","middle_name":"C.","last_name":"Hu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Washington, Seattle","department":""},{"first_name":"Daphna","middle_name":"","last_name":"Buchsbaum","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Toronto","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27317/galley/16953/download/"}]}