Chuyi Yang

Presentation Title

Children Use Private Correction As A Friendship Cue

Abstract

Children can use many cues to infer friendship. Here, we test a novel friendship cue: correcting someone in private. This cue is particularly interesting as people may correct others in private in order to salvage their reputation. In Study 1, 253 children (4-12 years) were asked whether an agent was better friends with a person they corrected in public or one they corrected in private. Children were above chance at selecting the character corrected in private as the closer friend (p < .001), and the effect became stronger with age. A second study sought to compare private correction to other cues known to indicate friendship: similarity, propinquity, and loyalty (Liberman & Shaw, 2019). In Study 2, 272 children (4-12 years) were asked whether an agent was better friends with someone they corrected in private or someone they engaged in a different friendship cue (similarity, propinquity, or loyalty). Results for participants who successfully tracked the story (n = 163) suggest that children saw private correction to be a good cue of friendship comparable to propinquity (p = .30) and loyalty (p = 1), and a better cue than similarity (p = .003). As in Study 1, with age children were more likely to endorse private correction as a good friendship cue. Overall, these findings suggest that concerns for others’ reputations may play an important role in friendships, and protecting another person’s reputation may be an important social interaction indicative of friendship.