The Origins of Social Categorization: Infants’ Inferences about Social Relationships and Shared Social Attributes

Social categorization has vast implications for myriad aspects of human social life, and studying its origins and development can inform our understanding of its pervasive influences across the lifespan. While a growing body of research has found early-emerging social preferences for in-group members, first person social preferences may arise due to familiarity and therefore do not necessarily indicate abstract conceptual reasoning about social categories. In this dissertation, I use third-party violation of expectation looking time studies to investigate infants’ inferences about social groups in the first two years of life. In Part I, I demonstrate that infants expect people who speak the same language to be more likely to affiliate than people who speak different languages, suggesting they may see language as a fundamental marker of social group. In Part II, I ask whether infants use other socially relevant behaviors, such as imitation of actions that may be seen as rituals, to make inferences about third-party social relationships. Here, I find that infants expect people who engage in the same causally-irrelevant actions to be more likely to affiliate than people who engage in different causally-irrelevant actions, and that these effects are not merely due to perceptual similarity. In Part III, I ask whether infants are selective in how they generalize socially relevant attributes across people. Results suggest that although infants’ baseline expectation is that food preferences are generalizable, they withhold generalizing food preferences across people who seem to belong to different social groups. In the general discussion I integrate this work with other broader research from developmental psychology to advocate for a new definition of social categorization that does not rely on first person social preferences and instead makes central inferences about social structure and inductive generalization. Taken together, this work indicates that infants demonstrate early emerging abilities to think about people as members of social groups, and provides novel insights into the origins of social categorization

Probing the impact of exposure to diversity on infants’ social categorization

Humans learn about the world through inductive reasoning, generalizing information about an individual to others in the category. Indeed, by infancy, monolingual children expect people who speak the same language (but not people who speak different languages) to be similar in their food preferences (Liberman et al., 2016). Here, we ask whether infants who are exposed to linguistic diversity are more willing to generalize information even across language-group lines. To test this, we ran an inductive inference task and collected data on exposure to linguistic diversity at the interpersonal and neighborhood levels. Infants with more linguistically diverse social networks were more likely to generalize a food preference across speakers of different languages. However, this relationship was not seen for neighborhood diversity. We discuss implications of this work on understanding the development of bias and its malleability based on early social experiences

Keeping friends in mind: Development of friendship concepts in early childhood

Friendship is a fundamental part of being human. Understanding which cues indicate friendship and what friendship entails is critical for navigating the social world. We survey research on three- to six-year-old children’s friendship concepts, discussing both classic work from the 1970s and 1980s using interview methods, as well as current work using simpler experimental tasks. We focus on three core features of young children’s friendship concepts: 1) proximity, 2) prosocial interactions, and 3) similarity. For each, we discuss how recent findings extend and expand classic foundations. Importantly, we highlight that children’s knowledge develops earlier and is deeper than initially hypothesized, and how children’s abilities are supported by early social inferences in infancy. We examine the implications of young children’s friendship concepts and note exciting new avenues for future research

Probing the Impact of Exposure to Diversity on Infants’ Social Categorization

Humans learn about the world through inductive reasoning, generalizing information about an individual to others in the category. Indeed, by infancy, monolingual children expect people who speak the same language (but not people who speak different languages) to be similar in their food preferences (Liberman et al., 2016). Here, we ask whether infants who are exposed to linguistic diversity are more willing to generalize information even across language-group lines. To test this, we ran an inductive inference task and collected data on exposure to linguistic diversity at the interpersonal and neighborhood levels. Infants with more linguistically diverse social networks were more likely to generalize a food preference across speakers of different languages. However, this relationship was not seen for neighborhood diversity. We discuss implications of this work on understanding the development of bias and its malleability based on early social experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)