UC Santa Barbara

As children learn to navigate the social world, they attend to certain cues that signal affiliation between individuals. One cue that children readily use is similarity such that people who do the same things or share the same characteristics are more likely to be affiliated than people who do different things. Additionally, rituals provide significant cultural information that children readily attend to. However, the importance of these two indicators may differ depending on the observed domain such that certain actions (e.g., eating) contain an abundance of social information without the use of rituals. Across two studies, we ask whether children (ages 4-11 years) differentially use similarity and rituals in determining affiliation. When children saw both ritual and non-ritual actions with objects, they rated those who did the same action, regardless of ritual status, as being affiliated more often than when they did different actions. However, this was not the case when children saw the actors interact with foods. Thus, children do consider similarity to different degrees when viewing food and non-food-related behaviors.