Kids understand how it feels to be ‘left out,’ but still exclude others

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-01-26 11:01

New Zealand; International

Photo by Charlein Gracia on Unsplash

Cultural values and political tensions may affect kids’ inclusion behaviours more than their empathic capacity, according to new research. In an experiment involving kids aged three to seven from New Zealand, Germany and Northern Cyprus, half the children were shown videos depicting an instance of social exclusion, and most of them clearly understood that the excluded party would have felt sad. The other half observed a ‘neutral’ situation. Researchers then analysed whether the video content affected children’s behaviour during a ball toss game with a puppet, where a second ‘outsider puppet’ was introduced later on. Results showed that the video content did not affect whether or not the children included the second puppet in the game, but New Zealand and German children were more likely to do so than those from Northern Cyprus. Researchers say more needs to be understood around how culture shapes these processes, and also speculate that ongoing conflict between Turkish and Greek Cypriots may impact the way that children from the region navigate group social settings.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

Children frequently encounter social inclusion and exclusion situations that grant or revoke their access to social groups. This cross-cultural study assessed effects of social exclusion experience on children's inclusion behaviors. Children from Germany, New Zealand, and Northern Cyprus were sensitive to exclusion and understood that excluded agents will be sad consequentially. Across cultures, exclusion experience did not affect children's subsequent inclusion of out-group agents into an ongoing play. However, children from Germany and New Zealand were more likely to include the agent than Northern Cypriot children. These results suggest universality without uniformity in children's navigation of social exclusion and inclusion.

Journal/
conference: Royal Society Open Science

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of Auckland, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany; University of Leipzig, Germany

Funder: This research was funded by the Max Planck Society and internal budgets at the University of Leipzig (no grant numbers assigned).

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