Children's Use of Social Categories in Thinking About People and Social Relationships

Shutts, Kristin; Roben, Caroline K. P.; Spelke, Elizabeth S.

doi:10.1080/15248372.2011.638686

Cited by 173 publications

(189 citation statements)

References 47 publications

(70 reference statements)

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“…In a typical sorting task, children are asked to generate piles of pictures of people who “go together”; in a typical social preference task, children are asked to select potential playmates from displays that present a boy and a girl, or a White child and a Black child; and in a typical inference task, children are asked to think about which people (e.g., two boys, or a boy and girl) share hidden properties or relationships with one another. Children use visual information about gender and race to guide their responses in all these tasks at least as early as the preschool years (e.g., Aboud, 1988; Bigler & Liben, 1993; Kowalski & Lo, 2001; Ramsey & Myers, 1990; Shutts, Roben, & Spelke, 2013; Waxman, 2010; Yee & Brown, 1994). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Young children's automatic encoding of social categories

Weisman

Johnson

Shutts

2014

Developmental Science

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The present research investigated young children’s automatic encoding of two social categories that are highly relevant to adults: gender and race. Three- to six-year-old participants learned facts about unfamiliar target children who varied in either gender or race and were asked to remember which facts went with which targets. When participants made mistakes, they were more likely to confuse targets of the same gender than targets of different genders, but they were equally likely to confuse targets within and across racial groups. However, a social preference measure indicated that participants were sensitive to both gender and race information. Participants with more racial diversity in their social environments were more likely to encode race, but did not have stronger racial preferences. These findings provide evidence that young children do not automatically encode all perceptible features of others. Further, gender may be a more fundamental social category than race.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Young children's automatic encoding of social categories

Weisman

Johnson

Shutts

2014

Developmental Science

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“…Although people can be categorized in many ways, we generally expect social groups to be characterized by affiliation between their members rather than solely by shared attributes (29). It is an open question whether infants under a year of age can represent such social relationships and use cues to affiliation to define social groups that can then be used in the service of inference about their members.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Preverbal infants expect members of social groups to act alike

Powell

Spelke

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The short ontogenetic time courses of conformity and stereotyping, both evident in the preschool years, point to the possibility that a central component of human social cognition is an early developing expectation that social group members will engage in common behaviors. Across a series of experiments, we show that by 7 months of age preverbal infants differentiate between actions by individuals that are and are not consistent with the actions of their social group members. Infants responded to group-inconsistent actions only in a social context: they failed to distinguish the same behavioral differences when presented with collections of nonsocial agents or inanimate objects. These results suggest that infants expect social group membership and behavior to covary, before extensive intergroup experience or linguistic input. This expectation is consistent with the socially motivated imitation and stereotyping evident in toddlers and preschoolers, and may play a role in the early emergence of one or both of these aspects of social behavior and cognition.social development | infancy

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“…As might be expected, similarity in appearance and attitudes plays a large role in affiliative evaluations (birds of a feather flock together; e.g., Byrne, 1971;Sunnafrank, 1983), but so do more arbitrary or accidental properties. To illustrate, 3-to 6-year-olds prefer children of their own gender when asked with whom they want to be friends (e.g., Shutts, Pemberton Roben, & Spelke, 2013); they prefer children who have experienced a lucky event (e.g., found money on a sidewalk) over children who have experienced an unlucky event (e.g., gotten splashed by a passing car) (e.g., Olson, Dunham, Dweck, Spelke, & Banaji, 2008); and, in a phenomenon called evaluative contagion, they prefer associates of lucky children over those of unlucky children (e.g., Olson, Banaji, Dweck, & Spelke, 2006).…”

Section: Sociomoral Versus Affiliative Evaluations When It Comes Tomentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy.

Baillargeon¹,

Scott²,

He³

et al. 2015

APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 1: Attitudes and Social Cognition.

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IntroductionConsider the following scene: A man wearing a backpack is pacing leisurely back and forth in a large airport room. As he strolls, he occasionally crosses his arms, twirls the dangling straps of his backpack, or stuffs his hands in his pant pockets. At one point, he sits down, takes off his backpack, and removes from it a bag filled with assorted gummy bears; as he peers intently inside the bag, he selects and eats, one at a time, five red gummy bears.As adults, we would have no difficulty interpreting the man's actions. We might view his initial actions-pacing, crossing his arms, and so on-as intentional (as opposed to accidental) though not as directed toward any particular goal. In contrast, we might perceive his subsequent actions-removing the bag of gummy bears from his backpack and eating five red ones in succession-as both intentional and goal-directed. In analyzing these actions, we might build an explanation that attributes to the man a causally coherent set of motivational and epistemic mental states: He wants to eat gummy bears, he is particularly fond of red ones, and so when he spies one in the bag, he removes it and eats it.Next, consider a new scene: As the man is happily chewing on red gummy bears, he notices a second man approaching who is carrying two heavy suitcases. At this point, our scene might unfold according to different scenarios. In one, the first man greets the second man, offers to carry one of the suitcases, and holds out his bag of gummy bears. In another scenario, the first man continues to watch the second man but makes no move to approach him. In yet another scenario, the first man sticks out a leg to trip the second man, causing him to fall heavily.As adults, we would interpret and evaluate the first man's actions in the three scenarios very differently. In the first scenario, we might infer that the two men have a social group in common: They might be friends, coworkers, or relatives, for example. In the second scenario, we 3 would conclude that the two men are strangers. In both the first and second scenarios, we would view the first man's behavior as acceptable: Offering help and sharing food are expected prosocial behaviors in interactions with ingroup, but not outgroup, individuals. In contrast, the first man's behavior in the third scenario would seem to us beyond the pale: Unprovoked harmful actions, even against outgroup individuals, are generally viewed as unacceptable. We would categorize the first man as an antisocial lout, and we might file away distinctive characteristics as possible markers of a social group to be avoided in the future.Our discussion of the two scenes above illustrates the rich analyses that adults spontaneously engage in when watching others act. What are the developmental origins of these interpretations? Over the past 25 years, there has been a great deal of research on social cognition in infancy. This research can be roughly organized into two sets of questions that map neatly onto the two scenes above. First, when watching an agen...

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Children's Use of Social Categories in Thinking About People and Social Relationships

Cited by 173 publications

References 47 publications

Young children's automatic encoding of social categories

Young children's automatic encoding of social categories

Preverbal infants expect members of social groups to act alike

Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy.

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