Jean-Pascal Assailly - Child Psychology

This view of child development has allowed us to better understand the similarities and differences between these various societies. For example, in all societies surveyed, infants are breastfed frequently and for long periods of time – 32 months on average. These results, combined with data from other sources, such as geochemical analyses of fossilized hominid teeth, suggest that breastfeeding is a consistent and probably ancient feature of human development. Ethnographic comparisons have also examined other aspects of early development, such as variation in learning strategies and parent–child relationships (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).

This meta-ethnographic approach has also been greatly facilitated by the HRAF (Human Relations Area Files), which maintains an archive of cultural information, a corpus of nearly 800,000 pages of ethnographic work about more than 300 different cultural, ethnic and religious groups from around the world. The technique of using and comparing archived ethnographic surveys has sometimes been called the “holocultural” approach. This approach has yielded a number of new insights into the role of cultural systems in child development.

For example, HRAF data allows us to study how different levels of social and political integration have influenced corporal punishment inflicted on children: societies with higher levels of social hierarchy and those in which non-relatives help to raise children are more likely to practice corporal punishment.

Similarly, subsistence strategy is related to child labor: hunter-gatherer children do relatively less economic work than food producers and agricultural societies assign work to children more often than hunter-gatherers. Learning begins in infancy, with children accompanying their parents on foraging expeditions, continues through early and middle childhood, primarily in the context of mixed groups, and matures in adolescence, when adults begin to teach children complex skills more directly (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).

An exemplary case study of the use of the multisite approach is an investigation by House and Silk (2013) into the “ontogeny” of social behavior. Using a forced-choice task, the authors investigated the emergence of prosocial behavior in 3–14 year-olds in Aka, American, Fijian, Himba, Martu and Shuar societies. They presented children with a choice between a 1–1 offer, which would offer one reward to the child and another to a peer (the “prosocial” choice), and a 1–0 offer, which would offer one reward to the child and none to a peer (the “other consideration” choice).

In a second task, children were offered a choice between the same prosocial offer (1–1) and a more advantageous option (2–0). Compared to the first trials, where the child received a reward regardless of choice, the second trials were costly from the child’s perspective: either they would receive two rewards or they had to share with a peer.

The results of this study showed an interesting pattern of cross-cultural variation: when faced with the first choice, children in all societies increasingly chose the prosocial option (1–1) based on their age, and there was relative homogeneity in children’s schools across sites. However, when faced with the second, more costly choice, children showed much more variation, suggesting that culture plays a more important role in children’s sharing behavior when costs are involved.

Perhaps one of the most interesting results is the finding that in late childhood children’s choices begin to converge with those of adults in their respective societies, elucidating the developmental period during which local norms can exert considerable influence on social behavior.

Contrast studies between Western and non-Western populations have been conducted largely to test the generalization of results. For example, merit-based equity judgments were compared among children in Germany, Namibia and Kenya: merit-based allocations roughly corresponded to the Western/non-Western divide, with German children assigning allocations based on merit, while Samburu children were relatively more likely to assign allocations based on equality. This result is related to the types of interactions common in these societies; indeed, frequent or infrequent interactions with outsiders could influence the relative value of merit or equality, respectively, in these societies (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).

In recent years, researchers have made great strides in formulating new methods for measuring cultural distance. In particular, Muthukrishna and Henrich (2019) have developed a new measure to help researchers design, plan and justify comparative psychological projects.

Based on a mathematical method originally intended to calculate the degree of genetic distance between two populations (called the fixation index, or F ST), the team created a new measure, called the cultural F ST, to calculate cultural distance from a large survey of cultural values in various societies. These methods are already gaining popularity in studies of cross-cultural variation in adult behavior.

In practice, the logistics of conducting cross-cultural research can sometimes involve a trade-off between breadth and precision: the collection of detailed ethnographic data across a wide range of communities by a single person, or even a single team, demands a great deal of time and effort, but there is much to be gained by combining and integrating the main points from these two approaches. Beatrice and John Whiting’s work on the emergence of social behavior, often referred to as the “Six Cultures” (1977), is a particularly significant and influential example of this successful overlap. This ambitious and unprecedented project had a series of interlocking parts. Working with their field teams, the researchers first produced detailed general ethnographies of the children’s host societies – in Kenya, Okinawa, India, the Philippines, Mexico and the United States – that included descriptions of the children’s upbringing and lives at the cultural level.

Next, the teams worked with families in each of these communities, conducting structured interviews with mothers. Finally, the field teams collected a large number of standardized observations of children’s behavior, resulting in more than 2,000 five-minute observations and nearly 10,000 coded interactions of approximately 134 children between the ages of 3 and 11.

Lamenting the fact that most existing cross-cultural work simply describes differences, rather than systematically exploring them, the authors used their body of data to address some of the most important issues in child development at the time, such as the effects of gender, age, birth order and culture on social behavior.

They also documented consistent gender differences among children, such as girls being more likely to ask for help, while boys were more likely to seek attention and dominance. These early insights into the role of culture in child socialization, and in particular in the development of prosocial behaviors, laid the groundwork for new waves of work to unpack the concept of culture.

An enduring lesson from the Six Cultures study is the effectiveness of the model for studying child development, a research model that focuses on the causes of fundamental societal characteristics, such as ecology and economics, on children’s formative practices, which in turn lead to variations in adult behaviors (Konner 2010).

To conclude this chapter, psychologists have begun to pay closer attention to considerations of culture and context when assessing human behavior. These waves of change have also reached developmental psychology, within which cross-cultural work is beginning to gain importance. Through meticulous work, we have learned more than ever about behavioral diversity in the early years of life, in different contexts, as research on children in diverse societies around the world helps us to understand the development, function and evolution of human behavior.