Exploring the origins and nature of social-group based inferences across early childhood

Categorization is a vital aspect of human cognition that helps guide learning and knowledge. However, when categorization is applied to social categories, it can have pernicious downstream effects such as stereotypes and prejudice. By preschool, children believe that members of a social category will share inherent, stable characteristics. Thus, it is important to understand when the tendency to use social categories to draw inferences about other people unfolds in early childhood. I began to address these issues in the current dissertation. Specifically, in three projects I examine the origins of social-group based inferences and how environmental influences shape these inferences across early childhood. Project 1 examined the types of characteristics that infants expect members of a social group to share. Twenty-month-old infants expected that a single individual would be consistent in her social dispositions. Infants did not generalize behavioral dispositions across members of a social group. However, additional results from Experiment 1 and 2 suggested that infants might have difficulty reasoning about social dispositions at this age. Project 2 showed that the manner in which parents discuss social groups influences how children learn about social categories and the beliefs that children form about social categories. Children that had generic statements read to them about a novel social category were more likely to view members of that category as being highly similar to one another than children that did not hear the generic statements. Project 3 demonstrated the relative salience of social categories in the environment, a more distal environmental influence, impacts the social categories that children attend to when making inductive inferences. Together, these studies shed light on the origins of social-group based inferences in infancy, and how the environment impacts these inferences across early childhood