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Poster #198 - Preschoolers’ Attend to Social Allegiances When Identifying Social Category Membership

Thu, March 21, 4:00 to 5:15pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Forming social categories helps children to navigate the complex social world by allowing them to make category-based inferences about members thoughts, beliefs, and social interactions. One way that children organize the social world is through an understanding that social categories mark individuals who are socially obligated to one another (Rhodes, 2012; Rhodes & Chalik. 2013). Here, we investigated whether 4- and 5-year-olds identify social category membership on the basis of observed social interactions (e.g., helping vs. harming). Using a novel social categories paradigm, we investigated the conditions under which children identify social category membership when presented with novel social categories (Experiment 1), familiar social categories (Experiment 2), and unlabeled social categories (Experiment 3).

In each experiment, children were first introduced to two novel social categories, the members of each category were diverse in appearance and the two categories could not be differentiated on the basis of perceptual features (Figure 1). The social categories differed as a function of their physical location and their characteristic social convention (e.g., singing vs dancing on holidays). During test trials, children witnessed members from each social category direct different social actions (harmful, helpful, or neutral) towards a series of novel test characters (who could not be identified as a member of either group). After each action, children were asked which social group the test character belonged to (categorization) and which social convention the test character engaged in (generalization).

In Experiment 1 (n=73), the social categories were given novel category labels (i.e., Blicks, Feps). When children witnessed a social category member direct helpful behavior towards an unmarked individual, children categorized that individual as belonging to the same social category as the helper. When children witnessed a category member harm an unmarked individual, children categorized the individual as belonging to a different social category (all ps < .001; see Figure 2). Children viewed these social categories as inductively powerful, assuming that newly identified members shared the same social convention as other members of the category (all ps > .05). In Experiment 2 (n=83), when the categories were given familiar labels (Singers, Dancers), children categorized on the basis of harmful (p=.006), but not helpful behaviour (p=.16) and extended the social convention in the harmful (p=.001), but not the helpful condition (p=.10). In Experiment 3 (n=37), the social categories were not identified by a category label and were described using specific language (i.e., these people). Here, 5-year-olds did not identify social category membership on the basis of harmful or helpful behaviour (p=.87) and (p=.14), respectively. Nor did they generalize the behavioural property in the harmful or helpful condition (p=.14) and (p=.87), respectively. In all three experiments, results from two neutral action trials confirmed that children’s predictions were not guided by perceptual or spatial cues on the display (ps >.15).

Together, these results demonstrate that children track social allegiances and use this information to identify social category membership. Categorical inferences are dependent on the type of social category and the linguistic information made available.

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