2-186 - Emergence of social categories and biases in infants and children: The cases of race and language

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Humans are skilled at forming categories. We do so using perceptual as well as conceptual cues, and not only for physical objects but also for social beings (Banaji & Gelman, 2013). For example, we readily categorize people based on social attributes such as race and language. Our ability to form social categories enables us to function efficiently, but also leads to biases and preferences. In contrast to extensive research on the ontogenesis of object categories, until recently, we knew little about how social categories emerge in early development, and how such categories translate into social biases and preferences. This symposium brings together four studies examining how race and language partition the social world for infants and children. For each attribute, one paper focuses on emergence in infants, and a second paper reports on development in children. The first and third papers report how asymmetrical experience with own- vs. other-race faces may lead infants to develop in-group (own-race) and out-group (other-race) representations (Paper 1), and how racial biases against other-race faces develop and may be reduced through perceptual training (Paper 3). The second and fourth papers outline research investigating how infants use language and affiliation as social category cues to make inferences about shared preferences (Paper 2), and how the use of language as a determinant of social preference by children is moderated by bilingualism, familiarity, and social status (Paper 4). The symposium offers new insights regarding ways in which race and language differentially organize social experience in infancy and childhood.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Kang Lee, University of Toronto

• Paul C Quinn, University of Delaware

Individual Presentations

• Narrowing in categorical responding to other-race faces by infants: Evidence for social category formation by 9-month-olds - Presenting Author: Paul C Quinn, University of Delaware; Kang Lee, University of Toronto; Olivier Pascalis, Université Pierre Mendes France; James W Tanaka, University of Victoria

• Infants use cues that are relevant to social categorization to determine who will share preferences - Presenting Author: Zoe Liberman, University of Chicago; Amanda Woodward, University of Chicago; Katherine D. Kinzler, University of Chicago

• Preschoolers’ implicit and explicit racial biases and differential effects of perceptual training to reduce them - Presenting Author: Kang Lee, University of Toronto; Miao Qian, Zhejiang Normal University; Gail D Heyman, Univ of California-San Diego; Paul C Quinn, University of Delaware; Genyue Fu, Zhejiang Normal University

• Children’s language-based preferences: The roles of bilingualism, familiarity, and social status - Presenting Author: Douglas A Behrend, Univ of Arkansas; Krista Byers-Heinlein, Concordia University; Rache Stevens, University of Arkansas; Diane Poulin-Dubois, Concordia Univ