Children as Cultural Explorers

Abstract

Abstract Human societies have developed over millennia in a variety of different social and physical environments, accumulating adaptations too complex and interdependent to be developed independently within the span of a single generation. Thus, every child, as a new member of their culture, must be able to learn from others in order to acquire the knowledge necessary to succeed—and every culture requires its children to be successful social learners for tools, technologies, and beliefs to be transmitted to the next generation. In this chapter, the authors examine the range of social learning abilities that children are equipped with, and how these capacities facilitate making inferences when faced with ambiguous and complex information. In particular, by combining their capacity for high-fidelity imitation and for understanding others’ intentions and goals, children can not only learn about a variety of physical causal relationships but also about a society’s norms, traditions, and rituals. Children can also form sophisticated and nuanced beliefs about when to trust others’ testimony, and balance the epistemic and normative value of imitating others when their sources disagree on what to believe or how to act. These characteristics, the authors argue, reflect children’s adaptation to learning within a cultural context, and prompt consideration about the unique role that children may play in cultural learning.