Learning From Others: Selective Requests by 3-Year-Olds of Three Cultures

Humans are unique in their propensity to intentionally instruct and subsequently learn a wide range of information from others. We investigated when and how young children become socially resourceful in using others' expertise, and whether the early propensity to request for help varies across diverse societies. We tested and compared 44 two-to four-year-old children growing up in urban United States and Japan, and rural Canada. Children were faced with two experimenters who demonstrated different abilities (successful vs. unsuccessful) in a toy retrieving task. We measured children's propensity to request for help and the relative selectivity of requests to one experimenter over another. Results show significant cross-cultural differences. U.S. children's request behavior differed significantly from the other two societies on three of the four measures. Specifically, U.S. children requested more overall, whereas Japanese children ceased manipulation (give up), and Canadian children continued to try on their own. Only the U.S. children show clear selective requests to the successful experimenter. On the last measure (gaze behavior), the U.S. and Canadian children look more to the successful model during the test phase than the unsuccessful model. These findings have implications for social learning research as well as the generalizability of developmental science.