Anna Michelle McPhee, Sinamys Bagh, Mark A. Schmuckler, Jessica A. Sommerville University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Navigating our social worlds requires us not only to be able to detect who we are affiliated with, but also to identify third-party social affiliations. While this ability appears to develop in early childhood, it is currently unknown when and how children are able to identify specific types of third-party social affiliations, such as parent-child relationships. The purpose of the current study was to explore the developmental trajectory of children’s ability to identify third-party parent-child relationships, and to explore whether a key behavioral output of first-person kinship detection, altruism, may be a valuable cue to aid in this process. Three- to five-year-old children (n = 97) were presented with hypothetical vignettes depicting interactions between an adult and child character with the presence of altruistic behavior and the type of relationship present manipulated across situational contexts. Participants were asked forced-choice questions about the scenarios, including questions about the type of relationship present, the characters’ anticipated behavior, their anticipated emotional reactions, and evaluations of the characters. Children as young as 3-years-old used the observation of altruistic behavior to infer parent-child relationships (p < 0.001), used knowledge of parent-child relationships to anticipate altruistic behavior (p = 0.006), and varied their anticipated emotional reactions (p = 0.02) and evaluations (p = 0.03) as a function of relationship type. The results suggest that the ability to identify third-party parent-child relationships develops in the preschool years and that key behavioral outputs of first-person kinship detection act as valuable cues to aid in this feat.
