Young children's automatic encoding of social categories

Abstract

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.

“American = English Speaker” Before “American = White”: The Development of Children's Reasoning About Nationality

“…Yet, not all categories in the world are essentialized. Many factors may contribute to which categories are more likely to be essentialized, and several studies suggest that essentialism based on race may not emerge spontaneously in early childhood but rather may follow a relatively protracted developmental trajectory (e.g., Rhodes & Gelman, ; Roberts & Gelman, ; Weisman, Johnson, & Shutts, ). These findings dovetail with evolutionary theory about social categorization, which asserts that race is a relatively new psychological phenomenon, in terms of human history (Kinzler, Shutts, & Correll, ; Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, ; Lieberman, Oum, & Kurzban, ; Van Bavel & Cunningham, ).…”

The Origins of Social Categorization

“…Despite the salience of individuals in social thinking, a large body of work suggests that the tendency to conceive of people as belonging to social categories is automatic [1–3]. Indeed, the ability to group instances into categories and to use category-based knowledge to generate novel inductive inferences is a powerful aspect of human cognition [1,4].…”

“…Indeed, although infants perceive race (Box 2) and children prefer own-race social partners [22], children do not use race as a conceptually rich category. Children do not automatically encode race [3], do not make race-based inductive inferences [46], and do not always expect race to be stable [38, 88]. Rather, seeing race as relevant for social categorization depends on social experience: minority race children, who likely think and talk more about race, see race as a defining feature of social identity earlier in development than majority race children [38, 88].…”

“…Additionally, growing up in racially diverse areas decreases children’s racial essentialism [102], and racial essentialism leads children to treat ambiguous race faces as outgroup members [103], suggesting exposure to diversity could decrease prejudice. On the other hand, gender may be a dedicated dimension of social categorization: children automatically encode gender [3], and make gender-based inductive inferences [38]. In fact, transgender children express clear gender identities and use gender to carve up the social world [104], suggesting attention to gender is present across a variety of experiences and backgrounds.…”

Young Children's Preferences: Gender, Race, and Social Status

“…Thus, measures of children's social trust and preferences suggest that young children focus on other people's gender, not their race (see also Ref. ).…”