Children's Conformity When Acquiring Novel Conventions: The Case of Artifacts

Prior research focused on children's acquisition of arbitrary social conventions ( e. g., object labels) has revealed that both 3- and 4-year-old children conform to majority opinion. Two studies explored whether children show similar conformist tendencies when making category-based judgments about a less socially arbitrary domain that offers an objective basis for judgment: object functions. Three- and 4-year-old children watched a video in which two informants disagreed with a lone dissenter on the function of a novel artifact. Children were asked to categorize the object by stating with whom they agreed. The plausibility of the majority's response was manipulated across test trials. Results demonstrated that children were more likely to agree with the majority when majority and minority opinions were equally plausible, especially when the majority demonstrated an overt consensus. However, 4-year-olds actively eschewed the majority opinion when it was implausible in context of the artifact's functional design. The current results indicate that expertise in a domain of conventional knowledge reduces conformist tendencies.