Poster #38 - Preverbal Infants’ Expectations about Group Membership and Valenced Social Behaviors

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

A major challenge for the young child is to navigate her social worlds. One part of meeting this challenge is to identify and understand the nature and scope of the social groups that make up social worlds. Here we explore one possible device that enables this: a domain-specific competence that facilitates identifying relevant groupings and their correlates (e.g., roles, statuses, relations of dominance and hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion). A considerable body of research has demonstrated this competence, this naïve sociology, among preschool children. Recently, a number of studies have explored the nuances of how preverbal infants monitor and interpret social groups (Powell & Spelke, 2013) and understand social relations (e.g. Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold-Smith, & Carey, 2011; Liberman, Woodward, & Kinzler, 2016). Our work explores an unaddressed dimension of infants’ reasoning about groups, viz., how do preverbal infants generalize their social evaluations of an agent to other members of a group. Across three experiments, we show that 8- to 12-month-olds make complex predictions based on valenced social behaviors and group membership. In Experiment 1—a conceptual replication of findings by Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom (2007) and Kuhlmeier, Wynn, and Bloom (2003)—we observed preverbal infants’ expectations about agents’ social affiliations. We found that infants do not expect to see a neutral agent approach an agent who had previously acted antisocially, as compared to one who had acted prosocially. Experiment 2 showcased an original design, based on that of Experiment 1, in which we explored whether infants would generalize their valenced evaluations of a social agent to its group members who had not behaved pro- or anti-socially. That is, would the infant expect an unseen potential for pro- or anti-sociality to extend to another simply in virtue of its group affiliation? Results showed that infants make affiliative predictions about a neutral agent approaching an established social group member of an agent that had acted antisocially. Experiment 3 served as a control measure to confirm that infants’ are able to monitor and encode the actions of individual members of a social group. When provided with a number of grouping and individuating cues (e.g. proximity, concerted motion, auditory tokens), preverbal infants were successful in tracking individual group members. Taken together, our results reveal that preverbal infants use the information they glean from social behaviors and interactions and use it to evaluate other members of a group. Preverbal infants’ propensity for generalizing assessments of social group members bolsters the argument for an early-emerging theory of naïve sociology as it highlights just one of the unique ways in which we represent and reason about complex social scenarios.

Authors

• Alyson Aladro, The New School for Social Research
  Presenting Author

• Matthew Wice, Department of Psychology, State University of New York at New Paltz
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marian Adams, The New School for Social Research
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lawrence Hirschfeld, The New School for Social Research
  Non-Presenting Author