SOCIAL PREFERENCES IN SINGAPORE PRE-SCHOOLERS: SOCIAL, COGNITIVE, SOCIO-COGNITIVE AND LINGUISTIC FACTORS OF INFLUENCE

Abstract

Past research: Much less is known about Asian preschoolers’ helping tendencies in a racially-defined inter-group context, which is a salient ingroup-bias triggering context but selectively-emphasized for children.

Thesis investigated two research questions: (1)different factors (cognitive inhibition and flexibility, theory-of-mind, cognitive empathy, group-attributions) influencing Singapore preschoolers’ social preferences (prosocial helping and implicit-explicit racial biases); (2)moderation by bilingualism on predictors of preschoolers’ social preferences. A battery of six tasks (altruism, implicit and explicit racial-bias, theory-of-mind, flanker, dimensional-change-card-sort), and hierarchical and moderated regression analyses were used.

Findings: linguistic and maturational factors better predicted preschoolers’ explicit forms of preferential-helping and racial biases; group-attributional and cognitive empathy factors better predicted their implicit racial and conditional-helping preferences; bilingualism moderated theory-of-mind and group-attributions, in the contexts of preschoolers’ conditional-helping and implicit-racial choices, respectively.

Implications: children’s naturalistic tendencies for inter-group and context-dependent social choices without explicit training; scaffolding of anti-bias tendencies for daily social learning and early intervention.