It’s not who you know: friendship networks did not shape children’s innovation or imitation propensities

Title Friendship networks, social learning, and innovation in children: sociometric and behavioural dataDescriptionThis dataset accompanies the manuscript "It's not who you know: friendship networks did not shape children's innovation or imitation propensities" (Rawlings, Flynn & Kendal). It contains sociometric friendship nominations, Big Five personality ratings, and experimental task data collected from 256 children aged 7–11 years across 10 primary schools in Northeast England.Children completed three experimental tasks. In the Multi-Method Box (MMB) task, children were offered the choice of observing a social demonstration or attempting a novel puzzlebox independently, and their subsequent learning and exploration behaviour was coded across 10 attempts. In the hook task, children were given a pipe cleaner and asked to retrieve a sticker from a transparent tube — a tool innovation challenge. In the Alternate Uses task, children generated as many uses as possible for a paperclip, providing measures of divergent thinking fluency and originality.Each child also completed a classroom peer-nomination task, nominating up to five close friends. Three sociometric indices were derived: out-degree (number of friends nominated), in-degree (number of times nominated by peers), and reciprocated friendships (mutual nominations). Parental ratings of children's Big Five personality traits were collected using an abbreviated version of the California Child Q-Set.The primary analyses tested whether sociometric network indices predicted learning strategy choice, imitation fidelity, innovation-by-modification, tool innovation, and divergent thinking, using multilevel models controlling for age and classroom clustering. No sociometric predictors were significant across any outcome. Age consistently predicted innovation-related outcomes, replicating established developmental findings.The dataset has been fully anonymised: participant names, dates of birth, testing dates, and nominated friends' names have been removed. School names have been replaced with alphanumeric codes (School_01 through School_09). A data dictionary (README tab) describing all variables, coding schemes, and value ranges is included within the file.