Banerjee, R., Watling, D., and Caputi, M. (In Press). Peer relations and the understanding of faux pas: Longitudinal evidence for bidirectional associations. Child Development.
Peer rejection and social understanding: A vicious cycle
Many research studies over the last twenty-five years have helped us to trace children’s development of social understanding, particularly how they come to make sense of people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts and feelings. But, surprisingly, we do not yet know much about how this kind of social understanding maps on to the relationships children have within their peer groups. This study is the first to provide strong evidence of a vicious cycle whereby early peer rejection seems to make it harder for children to develop a mature understanding of complex social situations, which in turn makes it likely that the children end up becoming more rejected.
We worked with one group of children aged 5-6 years old and one group of children aged 8-9 years old, and followed them over three school years. Once a year, children completed a measure of one aspect of social understanding – the understanding of situations where one person commits a faux pas (unintentionally insults another person) – as well as a survey that helped us gauge the extent to which each child was rejected within his or her class at school. By focusing on the characteristics of each individual child, we were able to see how early differences in peer rejection (at ages 7 and 8 years) predicted poorer later social understanding (at age 9 and 10 years). Furthermore, this analysis helped us see how those who still struggled with the social understanding task at age 10 ended up with higher levels of peer rejection at age 11.
These findings were consistent with our expectations that being rejected by one’s peers makes it much harder to learn about the more subtle aspects of social interaction. And in turn, failure to develop this kind of sophisticated understanding can ultimately lead to even more rejection. These findings are important because they extend our theoretical understanding of children’s social reasoning. Adding to some existing work showing the importance of the family context, our study highlights the importance of children’s peer relations in the development of social understanding.
From a practical point of view, too, these results can help us develop strategies for supporting children who are socially rejected at school. Increasingly, educational programs are being designed to support ‘social and emotional learning’, and the evidence from our study suggests that work which improves children’s understanding of commonplace social events (such as unintentional insults) could be of great importance in helping rejected children to develop more positive relationships with their peers.