Social Referencing

While continuing my reading on chapter 7, the concept of social referencing came across as interesting to me. Social referencing is the seeking of emotions or information from others (Berger, 2016). When children are at the toddler age, they look for clues in facial expressions (Berger, 2016). By paying attention to people's emotions and intentions, toddlers can then try to understand what people do (Berger, 2016). The part in the reading on social referencing that was interesting, was the information that talked about how toddlers are actually selective in their referencing! Apparently, children observe which strangers are reliable or not (Berger, 2016). I suppose that this means that besides a child's parents, close relatives, friends, and others who visit frequently, are all people that a toddler would reference to. Another piece of information that I found fascinating, was how social referencing could be applied. One example that the reading pointed out was mealtime. Through a process of showing a toddler expressions, where it shows them that an adult really likes a certain kind of food, it persuades the toddler to eat certain foods. This process explains and shows how children in some cultures, can develop a taste for foods that are rejected by other children in the other cultures. Growing up in a Korean household, I ate a lot of foods that I suppose American children would find "smelly" such as kimchi. I also love fish either raw or cooked. However, I have encountered some friends on campus who have told me that they do not like fish because of its "fishy smell". These conversations with my friends about fish, made me think that maybe they don't like fish because of their biological taste bud reference. After reading the topic of social referencing, I now think that people have preferences of certain foods, depending on what kinds of food they ate and were introduced to as a child.