Inductive Inferences Across Time and Identity: Are Category Members More Alike Than Single Individuals?

Lawson, Christopher A.; Kalish, Charles W.

doi:10.1207/s15327647jcd0702_5

Cited by 16 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Whereas the majority of research in this area has examined how children appeal to individual mental states to make these predictions, there has recently been increasing emphasis on understanding how children make these predictions by reference to social causes that extend beyond the individual, including social categories, norms, and morality (Hirschfeld, 1996; Olson & Dweck, 2008; Wellman & Miller, 2008). This emphasis—on considering children’s naïve sociology along with their naïve psychology —is particularly important given that preschool‐age children often weight the causal features specified by naïve sociology (e.g., categories, norms) more heavily than individual mental states (e.g., traits, desires) to predict individual action (Berndt & Heller, 1986; Biernat, 1991; Diesendruck & haLevi, 2006; Kalish, 2002; Kalish & Shiverick, 2004; Lawson & Kalish, 2006; Rhodes & Gelman, 2008; Taylor, 1996). A full understanding of the development of social cognition will require examining how children consider a wide range of causal mechanisms, and specifying how they select and weight various mechanisms across development and in different social situations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Naïve Theories of Social Groups

2012

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Four studies examined children's (ages 3-10, Total N=235) naïve theories of social groups, in particular, their expectations about how group memberships constrain social interactions. After introduction to novel groups of people, preschoolers (ages 3-5) reliably expected agents from one group to harm members of the other group (rather than members of their own) but expected agents to help members of both groups equally often. Preschoolers expected between-group harm across multiple ways of defining social groups. Older children (ages 6-10) reliably expected agents to harm members of the other group and to help members of their own. Implications for the development of social cognition are discussed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Naïve Theories of Social Groups

2012

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“…On such questions, participants are often provided with relatively limited information about an actor’s behavior (e.g., one example). Under these conditions, adults readily expect preferences and traits to be consistent over time, whereas children younger than age 7 demonstrate chance‐level responding (Kalish, 2002; Kalish & Shiverick, 2004; Lawson & Kalish, 2006).…”

Section: Dispositional Thinking In Early Childhoodmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As discussed in detail by Lawson and Kalish (2006), preschoolers’ willingness to base inferences on single pieces of evidence on category‐based induction tasks, such as those involving gender, is in stark contrast to their hesitancy to use a single piece of evidence to make an inference about an individual over time. Preschoolers appear to consider membership in certain categories as predictive of a wide range of properties, such that they expect members of the same category to share many nonobvious properties, even if they differ from each other in other ways, such as physical appearance (for a review, see Gelman, 2003).…”

Section: Category‐based Social Reasoningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Categories Influence Predictions About Individual Consistency

Rhodes

Gelman

2008

Child Development

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Predicting how people will behave in the future is a critical social-cognitive task. In four studies (N 5 150, ages preschool to adult), young children (ages 4 -5) used category information to guide their expectations about individual consistency. They predicted that psychological properties (preferences and fears) would remain consistent over time after hearing one example in which properties followed a category-linked distribution (e.g., children of different genders had different properties) but not when properties varied within a category (e.g., children of the same gender had different properties). The developmental course of these findings is examined. Results suggest the importance of considering how children's emerging theories of behavior and of social groups operate together to inform their expectations about the social world.

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“…Much of the research on children's categorization of unobservable properties has focused on biological features of animals (e.g., Carey, 1985;Gelman, 1988Gelman, , 2003Keil et al, 1998;Springer & Keil, 1991). However, there is evidence that children can also categorize on the basis of other types of unobservable properties, such as psychological traits (Cain, Heyman, & Walker, 1997;Graham, Welder, & McCrimmon, 2003), preferences (Lawson & Kalish, 2006), and ecological relations (Coley, 2012;Opfer & Bulloch, 2007).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%