3-033 - What underlies children's social preferences? Converging evidence for epistemic drives of social categorisation in childhood.

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Humans’ tendency to divide the social world into groups, preferring members of one’s own group and disfavouring others, is well documented and appears to be rooted early in development, yet the functions of early social categorisation remain unclear. This symposium combines four papers, supporting a novel perspective suggesting that in-group preferences may not be driven by affiliative motives or in-group loyalty, but serve primarily as a tool for infants and young children to selectively guide their cultural learning.

The first paper describes EEG experiments with 11-month-olds, providing evidence that infants’ preferences for members of their own cultural group may stem from their motivation to seek information and the best social partners to learn from. The second paper utilises looking-time measures with 9-month-olds, demonstrating that infants use observations of common engagement in a behaviour by multiple group members to identify actions that are conventional in nature, and expect the actions to generalise across the group. The third paper demonstrates that by 3 years of age, children not only identify conventional actions, but define the boundaries of shared cultural knowledge based on conventions and use these to guide their learning, selectively imitating novel actions of members obeying the conventions of children’s own cultural group. Finally, the fourth paper compares children’s inferences about conventional and moral actions with respect to group membership, and demonstrates 3-11-year-olds discriminate between group members only in attributing conventional, but not moral actions, again supporting the hypothesis of social categorisation in the service of defining and obtaining cultural knowledge.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Katarina Begus, Central European University, Cognitive Development Centre

Individual Presentations

• Infants' social preferences may be driven by their desire to obtain information - Presenting Author: Katarina Begus, Central European University, Cognitive Development Centre; Teodora Gliga, Birkbeck College, University of London; Victoria Southgate, Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen

• Infants’ Identification and Evaluation of Conventional Actions - Presenting Author: Lindsey Powell, MIT; Elizabeth Spelke, Harvard University

• Children selectively learn from culturally knowledgeable individuals - Presenting Author: Katalin Olah, Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University; Ildiko Kiraly, Eotvos Lorand University

• The Role of Linguistic Group Membership in Conventional and Moral Action Attributions - Presenting Author: Lauren Howard, Franklin and Marshall College; Zoe Liberman, University of California Santa Barbara; Nathan M. Vasquez, Yale University; Amanda Woodward, University of Chicago