Overestimation in Young Children Across Cultural Contexts

Abstract

This experiment explored how cultural differences influence young children’s overestimation levels. To investigate this, one hundred and fifty-six kindergarteners (M = 4.4 years) completed a motor task. Children from the Netherlands, and Turkey represented the independent, and interdependent self-construal respectively. The children were asked to build a tower from wooden blocks, as high as they could. Before starting to their task, the children were shown the ‘sticker cloud’, in which 76- stickers pointed their peers previous tower heights. Then, the children were asked to predict their own performances, and mark it with a sticker next to the ‘sticker cloud’. As expected, children from the Netherlands overestimated their abilities more than the Turkish children. Moreover, when gender specific estimation levels were compared, boys overestimated their abilities more than girls, regardless of their cultures