The Statistics of Group Cognition: New Evidence for Children’s Statistical Learning of Social Groups

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Understanding that people belong to social groups leads children to various social-cognitive inferences. Children categorize people based on group status over personality traits (Diesendruck & HaLevi, 2006), they negatively evaluate non-conforming group members (Roberts, et al., 2017), and they expect people to behave morally towards their group members (Chalik & Dunham, 2020). Though categorizing people into groups emerges early (Spelke & Kinzler, 2007), we have to learn which categories are relevant and have inductive potential (Heyman & Gelman, 2000; Rhodes et al., 2017). We present three papers showing new evidence that children use statistical regularities (Gweon et al., 2010) to learn about groups and make inferences about group properties and behaviors.

Paper 1 shows that U.S. and Chinese children generalize statistically sampled social actions (actions expected to be common to group members), but not preferences (actions specific to a single individual) from one agent to another. Paper 2 demonstrates that children and adults use minimal statistical information to infer group membership, but children’s inferences about in-group members’ preferences are sensitive to the out-group’s composition and size. Paper 3 shows that children prefer playmates who display mostly nice behaviors, regardless of group behavior, but when their past behavior is unknown, children are more likely to choose playmates from a predominantly nice group than a predominantly mean group. These papers show that statistical regularities play a role in children’s learning of social groups. An expert in social-cognitive development will discuss the studies’ implications for future research on statistical learning and group cognition.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Teresa Flanagan, Cornell University

Discussant

• Yarrow C Dunham, Yale University

Individual Presentations

• U.S. and Chinese Preschooler’s Generalization of Statistically Learned Preferences, Social Norms, Functions, and Labels - Presenting Author: Teresa Flanagan, Cornell University; Non-Presenting Author: Xin Alice Zhao, East China Normal University; Non-Presenting Author: Tamar Kushnir, Duke Univeristy

• Preschoolers use Minimal Statistical Information About Social Groups to Infer Individuals’ Preferences and Group Membership - Presenting Author: Natalia Velez, Stanford University; Non-Presenting Author: Hyowon Gweon, Stanford University

• Group- and Individual-Level Information Affects Children’s Playmate Choice - Presenting Author: Rongzhi Liu, University of California - Berkeley; Non-Presenting Author: Gil Diesendruck, Bar Ilan University; Non-Presenting Author: Fei Xu, University of California - Berkeley