ABSTRACT What factors contribute to children’s tendency to view individuals as having different traits and abilities? The present research tested whether young children are influenced by adults’ nonverbal behaviors when making inferences about peers. In Study 1, participants (aged 5–6 years) viewed multiple videos of interactions between a “teacher” and two “students”; all individuals were unfamiliar to participants. In each clip, the students behaved similarly, but the teacher did not: She either smiled, nodded, touched, or shook her head at one student, and she looked at the other student with a neutral expression. In Study 1, children tended to infer that students who received more positive behaviors from the teacher were smarter, nicer, and stronger. Study 2 pitted differences in the teacher’s behavior against differences in the students’ performance. When asked who was smarter, children selected lower-performing students who received more positive nonverbal cues from the teacher rather than higher-performing students who received less positive cues. These findings indicate that an authority figure’s nonverbal behaviors can influence children’s inferences about others and shed light on one mechanism guiding young children’s evaluations of people in their social world.

中文翻译：

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孩子们利用成人的非语言暗示来评价同龄人

摘要 哪些因素导致儿童倾向于将个人视为具有不同的特征和能力？本研究测试了幼儿在对同龄人进行推断时是否会受到成年人非语言行为的影响。在研究1中，参与者（5-6岁）观看了多个“老师”和两个“学生”之间互动的视频；所有的人对参与者来说都是陌生的。在每个视频中，学生们的行为都很相似，但老师却没有：她对一名学生微笑、点头、触摸或摇头，而她则以中性的表情看着另一名学生。在研究 1 中，孩子们倾向于推断，从老师那里得到更多积极行为的学生更聪明、更友善、更坚强。研究 2 将教师行为的差异与学生表现的差异进行对比。当被问及谁更聪明时，孩子们选择了表现较差的学生，他们从老师那里得到了更多积极的非语言暗示，而不是选择了表现较高的学生，他们从老师那里得到了较少的积极暗示。这些发现表明，权威人物的非语言行为会影响儿童对他人的推断，并揭示了一种指导幼儿评价社交世界中的人的机制。