No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Origins of “Us” versus “Them”: Prelinguistic infants prefer similar others
Abstract
A central feature of human psychology is our pervasive tendency to divide the social world into “us” and “them”. We prefer to associate with those who are similar to us over those who are different, preferentially allocate resources to similar others, and hold more positive beliefs about similar others. Here we investigate the developmental origins of these biases, asking if preference for similar others occurs prior to language and extensive exposure to cultural norms. We demonstrate that, like adults, prelinguistic infants prefer those who share even trivial similarities with themselves, and these preferences appear to reflect a cognitive comparison process (“like me”/“not like me”). However, unlike adults, infants do not appear to prefer others with an utterly arbitrary similarity to themselves. Together, these findings suggest that the phenomena of ingroup bias, and enhanced interpersonal attraction toward those who resemble ourselves, may be rooted in an inherent preference for similarity to self, which itself may be enhanced during development by the influence of cultural values.
... Alignment with others' behaviors, words, opinions, and choices often results in positive social outcomes. Across the lifespan, people choose to affiliate with others who have similar preferences and behaviors to themselves (Fawcett & Markson, 2010;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012;Over, 2020), and expect others to do the same (Afshordi, 2019;Liberman, Kinzler, & Woodward, 2014, 2021Over & Carpenter, 2015). Experiencing shared behaviors during social interaction leads participants to believe that it went smoothly (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999), and to engage in prosocial behaviors (Agnetta & Rochat, 2004;Carpenter, Uebel, & Tomasello, 2013;Meltzoff, 1990;van Baaren, Holland, Kawakami, & van Knippenberg, 2004;van Baaren, Holland, Steenaert, & van Knippenberg, 2003). ...
... Interestingly though, infants and children do not always view similar behavior and preferences as a sign of prosociality or social affiliation. Instead, similarity is sometimes viewed as socially and morally neutral, particularly when it is unintentional, coincidental, or arbitrary (Bian & Baillargeon, 2022;Fawcett & Markson, 2010;Jordan & Wynn, 2021;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012). For example, when choosing who they would like to play with, 3-year-olds and 1-year-old infants reliably select a character who previously chose similar toys or foods, but not a character with an arbitrary similarity, like a similar-colored sticker or mittens that were assigned (Fawcett & Markson, 2010;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012), or a similar item of clothing with an instrumental, non-social purpose (Bian & Baillargeon, 2022). ...
... Instead, similarity is sometimes viewed as socially and morally neutral, particularly when it is unintentional, coincidental, or arbitrary (Bian & Baillargeon, 2022;Fawcett & Markson, 2010;Jordan & Wynn, 2021;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012). For example, when choosing who they would like to play with, 3-year-olds and 1-year-old infants reliably select a character who previously chose similar toys or foods, but not a character with an arbitrary similarity, like a similar-colored sticker or mittens that were assigned (Fawcett & Markson, 2010;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012), or a similar item of clothing with an instrumental, non-social purpose (Bian & Baillargeon, 2022). When inferring friendships, 4-year-olds are more likely to select people who are similar in meaningful ways than people who have an arbitrary or coincidental similarity (e.g. it snowed on both of their birthdays; Afshordi, 2019). ...
Similarity of behaviors or attributes is often used to infer social affiliation and prosociality. Does this reflect reasoning using a simple expectation of homophily, or more complex reasoning about shared utility? We addressed this question by examining the inferences children make from similar choices when this similarity does or does not cause competition over a zero-sum resource. Four- to six-year-olds (N = 204) saw two vignettes, each featuring three characters (a target plus two others) choosing between two types of resources. In all stories, each character expressed a preference: one ‘other’ chose the same resource as the target, while a second ‘other’ chose the different resource. In one condition there were enough resources for all the characters; in the other condition, one type of resource was limited, with only one available (inducing potential competition between the target and the similar-choice other). Children then judged which of the two ‘other’ characters was being nicer (prosocial judgment) and which of the two was more preferred by the target (affiliative inference). When resources were limited (vs. unlimited), children were less likely to select the similar other as being nice. Children's initial tendency to report that the target preferred the similar other was also eliminated in the limited resource scenario. These findings show that children's reasoning about similarity is not wholly based on homophily. Instead, by reasoning about shared utility — how each person values the goals of others — children engage in flexible inferences regarding whether others' similar preferences and behaviors have positive or negative social meaning.
... They prefer the agent over another who does not share their preference. They also expect the same-preference agent to be treated positively, but the different-preference agent to be treated negatively by others and are even more likely to help the same-preference agent themselves by bringing a relatively heavy block to her (Gerson et al., 2017;Hamlin, Mahajan, et al., 2013;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012;Sommerville et al., 2018). In these studies, infants express their own preferences between the two options first. ...
... After finding out whether an agent has the same or opposite preference, infants are found to act differently toward them. If the alignment between infants' and agents' preferences was less than perfect (e.g., the infants expressed their preferences after the agents and also after they chose between agents, or when infants did not choose but were assigned to different groups), infants' favorable treatment toward the same-preference agent diminished (Mahajan & Wynn, 2012). Moreover, by at least 23 months of age, infants view same-preference agents as trustworthy sources of information (Fawcett & Markson, 2010). ...
A preference is defined as a dispositional state that helps explain why a person chooses one option over another. Preference understanding is a significant part of interpreting and predicting others' behavior, which can also help to guide social encounters, for instance, to initiate interactions and even form relationships based on shared preferences. Cognitive developmental research in the past several decades has revealed that infants have relatively sophisticated understandings about others' preferences, as part of investigations into how young children make sense of others' behavior in terms of mental states such as intentions, dispositions including preferences, and epistemic states. In recent years, research on early psychological knowledge expands to including infant understanding of social situations. As such, infants are also found to use their preference understandings in their social life. They treat favorably others who share their own preferences, and they prefer prosocial and similar others (e.g., those who speak their language). In reviewing these results, we point out future directions for research and conclude with further suggestions and recommendations.
This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development
Psychology > Development and Aging
... Such positive bias toward one's ingroup members emerges early in lifeindeed, prelinguistic infants demonstrate a significant preference for those who belong to their own-ethnic group (Kelly et al., 2005), speak their native tongue (Kinzler, Dupoux, & ☆ This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Rachel Barkan. Spelke, 2007), or share even trivial attributes (e.g., similar foods) with themselves (Mahajan & Wynn, 2012). Because of its prevalence and early developmental roots, some researchers argue that ingroup bias may be driven by an internal, spontaneous predisposition toward selfcategorization into social groups and therefore does not stem from social learning (for a review, see Dunham, 2018). ...
... Our study went further by demonstrating that reflexive ingroup favoritism existed in both Chinese and Western cultures. Such cultural universality contributes to the growth of evidence for the prevalence and early developmental roots of ingroup favoritism in a wide range of social behavior (Mahajan & Wynn, 2012;Powell & Spelke, 2013;Romano, Sutter, Liu, Yamagishi, & Balliet, 2021). Therefore, it is likely that ingroup bias stems from inherent features of the human mind (Dunham, 2018). ...
Third-party punishment (TPP) is critical for promoting cooperation and maintaining societal stability by deterring norm violations. Research has shown that TPP is influenced by ingroup bias, whereby people punish outgroup norm violators more severely than ingroups. The current study examined the social-cognitive mechanisms of the ingroup bias in TPP using a dual-process framework from a cross-cultural perspective. We asked whether people from different cultures were predisposed to ingroup bias, and whether this bias would change through reflection. To investigate this issue, we conducted five experiments employing economic games in Chinese and Western adults (total n = 1300) and a single-paper meta-analysis. Participants observed that ingroup and outgroup members allocated resources unfairly, and then decided how much money to deduct as punishment toward allocators in the reflexive or reflective modes (by manipulating response time constraint or cognitive load). Across a range of experimental designs, results provided converging evidence that Chinese and Western participants both exhibited ingroup favoritism in the reflexive mode, but behaved differently in the reflective mode: Chinese participants remained punishing ingroups less than outgroups, although they felt guilty and spent longer time dealing with ingroup violations; by contrast, ingroup favoritism decreased in the Western sample, especially among high group identifiers. These findings suggest that ingroup favoritism during TPP is reflexive and culturally universal, but it is manifested in different ways to meet specific cultural expectations when punishers make decisions in the reflective mode. This study thus deepens our understanding of how and why TPP is group-biased.
... Because the overwhelming familiarity of adult faces might have prevailed on a potentially subtler sensibility to the baby schema (Sanefuji et al., 2005), the infant/child face comparison may prove to be better suited to assess infant preference for infant faces than the infant/adult face contrast (Lewis & Brooks, 1975;Sanefuji et al., 2005). Furthermore, findings that 11.5-month-olds exhibit a preference for individuals sharing similarities with themselves in a ''like me/not like me" comparison process (Mahajan & Wynn, 2012; for related discussions on the developmental origin of a ''like me" representation, see also Meltzoff, 2005Meltzoff, , 2007 also support the idea that infants might present a bias for infant faces over child faces. ...
... Moreover, recent work demonstrating age-related change in the baby schema effect between adolescence and adulthood (Luo et al., 2020) suggests a largely protracted development of sensitivity to the baby schema. Likewise, the current results do not support a preference for ''similar other" or peer preference (e.g., Mahajan & Wynn, 2012), at least not when assessed with a visual preference procedure. ...
The current study examined the influence of everyday perceptual experience with infant and child faces on the shaping of visual biases for faces in 3.5-, 6-, 9-, and 12-month-old infants. In Experiment 1, infants were presented with pairs of photographs of unfamiliar child and infant faces. Four groups with differential experience with infant and child faces were composed from parents’ reports of daily exposure with infants and children (no experience, infant face experience, child face experience, and both infant and child face experience) to assess influence of experience on face preferences. Results showed that infants from all age groups displayed a bias for the novel category of faces in relation to their previous exposure to infant and child faces. In Experiment 2, this pattern of visual attention was reversed in infants presented with pictures of personally familiar child faces (i.e., older siblings) compared with unfamiliar infant faces, especially in older infants. These results suggest that allocation of attention for novelty can supersede familiarity biases for faces depending on experience and highlight that multiple factors drive infant visual behavior in responding to the social world.
... Children's recognition of shared versus differing preferences impacts their social behavior. For instance, infants and preschoolers prefer playing with peers who share their preferences (Fawcett & Markson, 2010b;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012), prefer items endorsed by those who have previously shared their preferences (Fawcett & Markson, 2010a), and avoid items endorsed by those who have opposed their preferences (Lumeng, Cardinal, Jankowski, Kaciroti, & Gelman, 2008). ...
... For example, children might have felt compelled to switch responses across trials. One reason to suspect that our task promoted switching is that both infants (e.g., Mahajan & Wynn, 2012) and 5-year-olds (DeJesus, Gerdin, Sullivan, & Kinzler, 2019) appear to dislike others who do not share their food preferences. Therefore, it is surprising that children predict such a high proportion of unshared preferences, unless they also assume they will dislike nearly everyone they meet! ...
Four experiments examined Canadian 2‐ to 3‐year‐old children’s (N = 224; 104 girls, 120 boys) thoughts about shared preferences. Children saw sets of items, and identified theirs and another person’s preferences. Children expected that food preferences would be more likely to be shared than color preferences, regardless of whether the items were similar or different in appeal (Experiments 1–3). A final study replicated these findings while also exploring children’s expectations about activity and animal preferences. Across all studies, children expected shared preferences at surprisingly low rates (never higher than chance). Overall, these findings suggest that young children understand that some preferences are more subjective than others, and that these expectations are driven by beliefs about domains of preferences.
... In one study, 3-to 11-year-olds expected speakers of their language would be more likely to conform to social conventions than speakers of different languages . Children's favorable expectations for similar others even emerges when they are randomly assigned to minimal groups (Baron & Dunham, 2015;Dunham, 2018;Dunham et al., 2011), and even appears in preverbal infants (Bian et al., 2018;Kinzler et al., 2007;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012;Pun et al., 2018). ...
... First, the older a participant was, the more likely they chose an older person as the most moral. This result is consistent with the line of research highlighting that we generally value people who are more similar to us (Alves et al., 2016) from the first days we are born (Mahajan & Wynn, 2012). Second, women were more likely than men to choose an older person as the most moral. ...
... A growing body of work suggests that infants expect resources to be divided equally (Schmidt & Sommerville, 2011;Sloane et al., 2012;Ziv & Sommerville, 2017), yet recognize that when resources are limited, ingroup members will be favored (Bian et al., 2018;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012). While less work has examined expectations in older children, a study by Renno and Shutts (2015) showed that 6-to 8-year-olds expect gender and racial ingroup members to help them more often than outgroup members. ...
From a young age, children think resources ought to be distributed equally but expect resources to be shared preferentially with ingroup members. These desires for both impartiality and partiality take root in early childhood and likely become further entangled with age due to exposure to existing forms of group-based inequalities. Here, we ask whether children expect fairness or favoritism from an authority figure in the context of a real-world form of group-based inequality—the gender gap in pay. We tested 4- to 11-year-olds’ (N = 157) and adults’ (N = 101) expectations of how girls and boys would be rewarded by a teacher for performing a classroom task. Children were asked whether they expected a boy or girl to receive the larger reward (three versus two of five cookies) after completing a job. We found that 4- and 5-year-old children expected their own gender to be rewarded more favorably, an expectation that aligns with past work showing an own-gender bias in resource allocation. By contrast, and with the exception of 8- and 9-year-old boys, children in the 6- to 11-year-old range expected gender parity in pay, as did adults, a finding that contrasts with own-gender biases and with the real-world gender gap in pay. Our results shed new light on children’s evolving expectations of how rewards will be distributed in a context in which fairness and favoritism are in tension. Moreover, they provide a foray into children’s expectations about gender pay parity, an important and persistent issue in the society in which these children are developing.
... The association between similar food consumption and social connection emerges in early childhood. Infants and toddlers prefer people (and puppets) who share their food preferences (Fawcett & Markson, 2010;Gerson et al., 2017;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012). Infants also make inferences about others' social connection from their food preferences. ...
For centuries, the preparation and eating of a meal has brought people together, making food consumption an inherently social process. Yet the way in which people connect over food is changing. Rising health concerns, due in part to the increase in food allergies and obesity, have shifted attention away from the social aspects of food to food's nutritional aspects. Recognizing the social context in which food consumption takes place, this article reviews research highlighting the interpersonal consequences of joint food consumption. We first examine research on how sharing food connects people together, both via the type of food consumed (e.g., incidental food similarity) and the manner in which people serve and eat food (e.g., from shared vs. separate plates). We then turn to research that addresses the opposite side of the coin, discussing how the inability to share in a meal can be isolating, as well as how people navigate conflicting preferences when making food decisions with others. We conclude with a discussion of promising future directions for research on joint food consumption.
... Evidence of ingroup bias appears surprisingly early in development. Before babies are able to speak, they show preferences for those who are similar to them (Mahajan & Wynn, 2012). These biases grow stronger in early childhood as children enter preschool (Aboud, 2003). ...
The current study investigates children’s understanding of the social dynamics of complex groups. We asked children to use relative differences in intragroup status to predict the behaviors of individuals. Specifically, who do children (ages 3 to 10, n =
120) and adults (n = 34) believe a subordinate “worker” would be loyal to (another worker or to their “boss”), and whom the worker would prefer to socialize with? Young children
predicted that workers would be loyal to other workers, but as age increased so did children’s tendency to predict that workers would be loyal to bosses. Regardless of age, children and adults believed that workers would prefer to spend time with other
workers. These results have important implications for how children understand and navigate nuanced power differentials within a group.
... Especially relevant to protopolitical cognition are findings showing that children identify and give weight to group membership and group boundaries from very early on (e.g., Bigler & Liben, 2007;Dunham, 2018;Rutland, Killen, & Abrams, 2010;Rhodes & Baron, 2019). Before the end of the first year of life, infants already classify people into socially relevant group dimensions such as gender, race, and ethnic identity (e.g., Bar-Haim et al., 2006;Singarajah et al., 2017;Waxman & Grace, 2012); have expectations about social interactions based on group membership (e.g., Buyukozer Dawkins et al., 2020); better identify and differentiate members of their ingroup than members of other groups (Kelly et al., 2007;Quinn et al., 2016); and prefer those who are similar to them (Kinzler et al., 2007;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012;Pun et al., 2017). Furthermore, already at 3 years of age, and more robustly by 5, children prefer members of known ingroups (e.g., religion, race, gender) over members of known outgroups (Castelli & Carraro, 2020;Heiphetz et al., 2013;Shutts, 2015), as well as members of artificial ingroups (vs. ...
Research in political psychology largely ignores early childhood. This is likely due to the assumption that young children lack the cognitive capacity and social understanding needed for political thought. Challenging this assumption, we argue that research with young children is both possible and important for political psychologists. We focus on the topic of political ideology to demonstrate our argument. We review recent evidence revealing that social cognition in early childhood—and even infancy—is already oriented toward group living in ways that set the foundation of political thought. Young children notice key dimensions of group living (e.g., group boundaries, hierarchies, norms) and use them to guide their reasoning and behavior. Beyond these basic proto-political sensitivities, young children also display proto-political attitudes: valenced and/or prescriptive cognitions about dimensions of group living that have political significance (e.g., disliking nonconforming group members, believing that hierarchy between groups is wrong). Even more reminiscent of mainstream political psychology, young children’s proto-political sensitivities and attitudes exhibit systematic individual differences that can roughly be mapped onto three ideological orientations common among adults: authoritarianism, social dominance, and hawkish ideology. We discuss ways in which research with young children is critical for a complete understanding of adult political psychology.
... Young children's affiliation with others who share their preferences may be explained by the general preference for similar others, a preference evident from infancy (e.g., Mahajan and Wynn, 2012). According to Dishion et al. (1994), interpersonal similarity may lead to an emotional sense of connectedness that begins the process of becoming friends. ...
This study investigated five-year-olds’ priority between shared preference and group membership in resource allocation, social preference, and social evaluation. Using a forced-choice resource allocation task and a friend choice task, we first demonstrate that five-year-old children distribute more resources to and prefer a character who shares a preference with them when compared to a character who has a different preference. Then, we pitted the shared preference against group membership to investigate children’s priority. Children prioritized group membership over shared preference, allotting more resources to and showing more preference toward characters in the same group who did not share their preferences than those from a different group who shared their preferences. Lastly, children evaluated resource allocation and social preference in others that prioritized group membership or shared preference. Children regarded prioritization of group membership more positively than prioritization of shared preference from the perspective of a third person. The results suggest that children by five years of age consider group membership as of greater importance than shared preference not only in their own resource allocation and social preference, but also in their evaluation of others’ resource allocation and liking.
... This judgment of a self-other dichotomy can be based on a variety of often superficial factors that present the quality of similarity. They can range from skin colour and personal beliefs [18], to the colour of a t-shirt and preference for crackers over green beans in infants [113], to even experimentally-induced false belief of groupdivision based on impressionist art preference [171]. Notably, these Mentis et al. [116]. ...
Human connection is essential for our personal well-being and a building block for a well-functioning society. There is a prominent interest in the potential of technology for mediating social con- nection, with a wealth of systems designed to foster the feeling of connection between strangers, friends, and family. By surveying this design landscape we present a transitional definition of medi- ated genuine connection and nine design strategies embodied within 50 design artifacts: affective self-disclosure, reflection on unity, shared embodied experience, transcendent emotions, embodied metaphors, interpersonal distance, touch, provocations, and play. In addition to drawing on design practice-based knowledge we also identify un- derlying psychological theories that can inform these strategies. We discuss design considerations pertaining to sensory modalities, vulnerability–comfort trade-offs, consent, situatedness in context, supporting diverse relationships, reciprocity, attention directed- ness, pursuing generalized knowledge, and questions of ethics. We hope to inspire and enrich designers’ understanding of the possi- bilities of technology to better support a mediated genuine feeling of connection.
... When an avatar is used in non-traditional economies, the first question we pose is whether or not the similarity of the avatar to the shopper would influence psychological ownership. From infancy, people tend to favor those who are similar to themselves and are biased toward them (Mahajan and Wynn, 2012;Gaertner and Insko, 2000). Research on buyer-seller similarity and its relationship with sales performance has shown mixed results for observable similarity traits, but positive results for internal similarity, or the perception that the salesperson thinks, feels, and acts the same as the customer (Lichtenthal and Tellefsen 2001). ...
... Our people-sorting capacity plays out in social psychology through in-group formation and bias (Brewer 2007) and in personality psychology via the need to belong as a fundamental human motivation (Baumeister and Leary 1995). A body of evidence from developmental psychology suggests that our sensitivities here emerge early in life (Kelly et al. 2005;Kinzler et al. 2007;Mahajan and Wynn 2012). These sensitivities perhaps build on what Meltzoff (2007) calls "like me" detectors used in infant imitation (Meltzoff and Moore 1977;see Oostenbroek et al. 2016 for a critique). ...
The conceptualisation of kinship and its study remain contested within anthropology. This paper draws on recent cognitive science, developmental cognitive psychology, and the philosophy of science to offer a novel argument for a view of kinship as progeneratively or reproductively constrained. I shall argue that kinship involves a form of extended cognition that incorporates progenerative facts, going on to show how the resulting articulation of kinship’s progenerative nature can be readily expressed by an influential conception of kinds, the homeostatic property cluster view. Identifying the distinctive role that our extended cognitive access to progenerative facts plays in kinship delivers an integrative, progenerativist view that avoids standard performativist criticisms of progenerativism as being ethnocentric, epistemically naïve, and reductive.
... Already prelinguistic infants are capable of recognizing categorial distinctions among humans. They demonstrate a preference to look at own-ethnicity faces and listen to ownlanguage speakers, and prefer those others who share trivial, but not arbitrary, similarities to themselves (Kelly et al., 2005;Kinzler, 2021;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012). From a very young age, children are alert to the categorial distinctions that are meaningful and used in their social environment and quickly familiarize themselves to what they are exposed to. ...
There are various theoretical approaches for understanding intergroup biases among children and adolescents. This article focuses on the social identity approach and argues that existing research will benefit by more fully considering the implications of this approach for examining intergroup relations among youngsters. These implications include (a) the importance of self-categorization, (b) the role of self-stereotyping and group identification, (c) the relevance of shared understandings and developing ingroup consensus, and (d) the importance of coordinated action for positive and negative intergroup relations. These implications of the social identity approach suggest several avenues for investigating children’s and adolescents’ intergroup relations that have not been fully appreciated in the existing literature. However, there are also limitations to the social identity approach for the developmental understanding and some of these are discussed.
... Then, groups are asked to generate a list of why the members of the other group chose to either wear or not wear jeans. As a follow-up, empirical evidence demonstrating that children as well as infants show tendencies towards self-serving biases can be presented and discussed (Mahajan & Wynn, 2012). Lastly, these studies can be discussed within the context of empirical research showing that when people are informed of their own racial biases, they become 91 more motivated and are subsequently more successful in reducing their own prejudice (Amodio et al., 2007). ...
Many higher education instructions have set forth explicit objectives to improve college students’ intercultural sensitivity and communication. However, there currently exits considerable heterogeneity in terms of the extent and methods that higher education institutions undertake in order to achieve these important goals. This praxis essay provides a framework to understand the process of intercultural learning in college students, the core features of academic cultural psychology, and makes specific recommendations for effective and innovative ways to teach a cultural psychology course to a broad range of undergraduate students. Specific teaching techniques are offered to target specific intercultural learning areas.
... Attention to race emerges early in infancy. Infants prefer to look at faces of people whose race matches those of their primary caregivers and those closest to them (Anzures et al., 2013;Bar-Haim et al., 2006;Dunham et al., 2015;Lee et al., 2017;Liu et al., 2015;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012;Sangrigoli & De Schonen, 2004;Sugden & Marquis, 2017). These early perceptual preferences, evident as early as 3 months of age, are guided by infants' own experience. ...
Overt expressions of racial intolerance have surged precipitously. The dramatic uptick in hate crimes and hate speech is not lost on young children. But how, and how early, do children become aware of racial bias? And when do their own views of themselves and others become infused with racial bias? This article opens with a brief overview of the existing experimental evidence documenting developmental entry points of racial bias in infants and young children and how it unfolds. The article then goes on to identify gaps in the extant research and outlines three steps to narrow them. By bringing together what we know and what remains unknown, the goal is to provide a springboard, motivating a more comprehensive psychological-science framework that illuminates early steps in the acquisition of racial bias. If we are to interrupt race bias at its inception and diminish its effects, then we must build strong cross-disciplinary bridges that span the psychological and related social sciences to shed light on the pressing issues facing our nation’s young children and their families.
... Beyond the types of information included in a story, learners are also sensitive to the identity and reputation of the storyteller. These model-based transmission biases include prestige (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001), success (Mesoudi, 2008), and similarity bias (Mahajan & Wynn, 2012;McElreath et al., 2003). In this study, we specifically examine prestige bias, which involves a preference to learn from individuals of high social position, reputation, and knowledge (Berl et al., 2020). ...
Cultural transmission biases such as prestige are thought to have been a primary driver in shaping the dynamics of human cultural evolution. However, few empirical studies have measured the importance of prestige relative to other effects, such as content biases present within the information being transmitted. Here, we report the findings of an experimental transmission study designed to compare the simultaneous effects of a model using a high- or low-prestige regional accent with the presence of narrative content containing social, survival, emotional, moral, rational, or counterintuitive information in the form of a creation story. Results from multimodel inference reveal that prestige is a significant factor in determining the salience and recall of information, but that several content biases, specifically social, survival, negative emotional, and biological counterintuitive information, are significantly more influential. Further, we find evidence that reliance on prestige cues may serve as a conditional learning strategy when no content cues are available. Our results demonstrate that content biases serve a vital and underappreciated role in cultural transmission and cultural evolution.
... For example, most infants will approach their mother over a stranger when given a choice (Corter, 1973). Additionally, laboratory studies reveal that infants develop and express preferences for individuals based on their actions-for example, favoring those who have behaved prosocially (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007) as well as those who mirror infants' own actions and choices (Mahajan & Wynn, 2012). But, do infants like and feel closer to groups of people? ...
In this chapter, we bridge research on scientific and counterfactual reasoning. We review findings that children struggle with many aspects of scientific experimentation in the absence of formal instruction, but show sophistication in the ability to reason about counterfactual possibilities. We connect these two sets of findings by reviewing relevant theories on the relation between causal, scientific, and counterfactual reasoning before describing a growing body of work that indicates that prompting children to consider counterfactual alternatives can scaffold both the scientific inquiry process (hypothesis-testing and evidence evaluation) and science concept learning. This work suggests that counterfactual thought experiments are a promising pedagogical tool. We end by discussing several open questions for future research.
... The first explanation is consistent with at least three lines of research. First, there is evidence that even infants prefer individuals who are similar to them on some dimension (Kelly et al., 2005;Kinzler et al., 2012;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012), and have positive associations regarding members of their group (Pun et al., 2018;Xiao et al., 2018). Second, from a young age, children already manifest automatic implicit intergroup biases regarding various social groups (Dunham et al., 2006;Essa et al., 2019). ...
This study evaluated the effectiveness of a vicarious contact intervention program for improving knowledge and attitudes of Jewish-Israeli secular and religious children regarding their ingroup and three outgroups: secular/religious Jews, Ethiopian-descendant Jews, and Arabs. One hundred and nine kindergartners participated in a four-week intervention, in which experimenters introduced to them four persona dolls representing the different groups. Accompanied by stories, children were exposed to the dolls’ individual and group characteristics, and to positive encounters between the dolls. A pre- and post-test battery assessed the intervention’s effects on children’s intergroup knowledge and attitudes. Findings revealed an increase in children’s knowledge of the groups, improvements in religious children’s attitudes towards Arabs, and in both secular and religious children’s willingness to sit closer to Ethiopian-descendant children. These findings highlight the potential of indirect contact for reducing intergroup bias in young children living in multicultural and conflict-ridden societies.
... For example, studies of the ontogeny of attitudes toward in-group and out-group members (e.g., Mahajan and Wynn, 2012;Buttelmann and Böhm, 2014) are predicated on the assumption that socially motivated cognitive grouping is part of human behavior and likely emerges quite early. Judgments of an informant's value as both a linguistic and a non-linguistic source of information are tightly linked in infants (Kinzler et al., 2007;Schachner and Hannon, 2011). ...
We incorporate social reasoning about groups of informants into a model of word learning, and show that the model accounts for infant looking behavior in tasks of both word learning and recognition. Simulation 1 models an experiment where 16-month-old infants saw familiar objects labeled either correctly or incorrectly, by either adults or audio talkers. Simulation 2 reinterprets puzzling data from the Switch task, an audiovisual habituation procedure wherein infants are tested on familiarized associations between novel objects and labels. Eight-month-olds outperform 14-month-olds on the Switch task when required to distinguish labels that are minimal pairs (e.g., “buk” and “puk”), but 14-month-olds' performance is improved by habituation stimuli featuring multiple talkers. Our modeling results support the hypothesis that beliefs about knowledgeability and group membership guide infant looking behavior in both tasks. These results show that social and linguistic development interact in non-trivial ways, and that social categorization findings in developmental psychology could have substantial implications for understanding linguistic development in realistic settings where talkers vary according to observable features correlated with social groupings, including linguistic, ethnic, and gendered groups.
... From an early age, humans tend to categorize ourselves and others as "us versus them" (Liberman, Woodward, & Kinzler, 2017;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012). These categorizations can lead individuals to enact disparate behaviors toward ingroup and outgroup members. ...
Roughly twenty years of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have investigated the neural correlates underlying engagement in social cognition (e.g., empathy, emotion perception) about targets spanning various social categories (e.g., race, gender). Yet findings from individual studies remain mixed. In the present quantitative functional neuroimaging meta-analysis, we summarized across 50 fMRI studies of social cognition to identify consistent differences in neural activation as a function of whether the target of social cognition was an ingroup or outgroup member. We investigated if such differences varied according to social category (i.e., race) and social cognitive process (i.e., empathy, emotion perception). We found that social cognition about ingroup members was more reliably related to activity in brain regions associated with mentalizing (e.g., dmPFC), whereas social cognition about outgroup members was more reliably related to activity in regions associated with exogenous attention and salience (e.g., anterior insula). These findings replicated for studies specifically focused on the social category of race, and we further found intergroup differences in neural activation during empathy and emotion perception tasks. These results help shed light on the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition across group lines.
... For instance, by 1-year of age, a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 infants more easily associate positively valenced stimuli with individuals who speak their own language, than with individuals who speak another language [1], and associate positively valenced music with own-race faces and negatively valenced music with other-race faces [2]. In other words, by 1 year of age, infants seem capable of representing certain social groups, and have valenced attitudes towards them [see also 3,4]. ...
Recent studies indicate that a preference for people from one’s own race emerges early in development. Arguably, one potential process contributing to such a bias has to do with the increased discriminability of own- vs. other-race faces–a process commonly attributed to perceptual narrowing of unfamiliar groups’ faces, and analogous to the conceptual homogenization of out-groups. The present studies addressed two implications of perceptual narrowing of other-race faces for infants’ social categorization capacity. In Experiment 1, White 11-month-olds’ ( N = 81) looking time at a Black vs. White face was measured under three between-subjects conditions: a baseline “preference” (i.e., without familiarization), after familiarization to Black faces, or after familiarization to White faces. Compared to infants’ a priori looking preferences as revealed in the baseline condition, only when familiarized to Black faces did infants look longer at the "not-familiarized-category" face at test. According to the standard categorization paradigm used, such longer looking time at the novel (i.e., "not-familiarized-category") exemplar at test, indicated that categorization of the familiarized faces had ensued. This is consistent with the idea that prior to their first birthday, infants already tend to represent own-race faces as individuals and other-race faces as a category. If this is the case, then infants might also be less likely to form subordinate categories within other-race than own-race categories. In Experiment 2, infants ( N = 34) distinguished between an arbitrary (shirt-color) based sub-categories only when shirt-wearers were White, but not when they were Black. These findings confirm that perceptual narrowing of other-race faces blurs distinctions among members of unfamiliar categories. Consequently, infants: a) readily categorize other-race faces as being of the same kind, and b) find it hard to distinguish between their sub-categories.
... There have been many scholarly discussions on the innate and universal nature of psychological essentialism as a fundamental cognitive framework. Empirical studies on infant cognition demonstrated that social categorization (i.e., the differentiating between "us versus them") and in-group preference already emerge at a very early life stage (Kiley Hamlin et al., 2010;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012), thereby suggesting the innate nature of social categorization. Previous studies beyond W.E.I.R.D. societies (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic;Henrich et al., 2010) provided some (albeit limited) cross-cultural evidence for the presence of psychological essentialism (e.g., Astuti et al., 2004;Atran et al., 2002;Davoodi et al., 2020;Medin & Atran, 2004;Vapnarsky et al., 2001). ...
Nationality constitutes a salient part of social categorization. However, little research has examined how people form nationality concepts and how it may be shaped by culture and experience. The current study aims to investigate essentialist beliefs about nationality in participants from two cultural origins: the United States and China. In both samples, we compared college students studying domestically and internationally (N = 290) by using direct and indirect measures of essentialism. Ratings from direct measures of essentialism revealed that American participants were more likely than Chinese participants to perceive national groups as natural, whereas Chinese participants were more likely than American participants to perceive national groups as cohesive. Interestingly, the observed differences between domestic and international students on the indirect measure showed opposite directions among participants of different cultures of origin. As hypothesized, American international students showed lower essentialist thinking than American domestic students. Surprisingly, Chinese international students showed stronger essentialist thinking than Chinese domestic students. Further analyses revealed a positive relationship between the length of arrival time and essentialist thinking by Chinese international students. The current research demonstrates the cognitive malleability of social essentialism, addressing the importance of examining the effect of intergroup processes under diverse and dynamic cultural contexts.
... [1] This, in turn, could be building on an inherent preference for a "similarity to self". [2] More importantly, all such tendencies should probably be seen in the context of an even more profound human biological characteristic, that of neoteny. What is neoteny BioEssays. ...
This article describes aspects of our biological nature that have contributed to the dangerous current state of societal, ecological and climatological affairs. Next, it deals with stratagems to take these aspects into account, so as to allow us better choices. I will concentrate on the concepts of evolved group mechanisms and "neoteny" and explain why they direct our responses throughout our lives. The connection between our biological make-up and our vulnerability to the current rise of certain kinds of irrational, undemocratic, populism is also laid bare. I will end by listing some simple, but possibly controversial, proposals that might have value in combating these societal tendencies and help decision making in a reality-based, more scientific, manner.
... However, using similarity to choose social partners begins quite early in development: 1 year olds preferred puppets that shared their food preference (Mahajan & Wynn, 2012), and 3 year old preferred others that had similar preferences or appearance to them (i.e., hair color, Fawcett & Markson, 2010). Interestingly, in both of these cases, young children were not attending to surface-level similarity: in control conditions, neither 1 nor 3 year olds preferred characters that were assigned to wear the same-colored clothing as them. ...
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 3‐ to 6‐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.
Demut wäre nicht erstrebenswert, wenn sie nicht messbare Effekte zeitigen würde. In den letzten zehn Jahren hat die Forschung in Hunderten von Projekten messbare, zum überwiegenden Teil positive Ergebnisse von Demut festgestellt. Sie lassen sich in drei Gruppen einteilen: Auswirkungen einer demutsvollen Führungskraft auf die Mitarbeiter (z. B. in Bezug auf Leistung oder Kreativität), Resultate für das gesamte Unternehmen (z. B. in Bezug auf Strategie oder Kultur) sowie Konsequenzen für die Führungskraft selber (z. B. in Bezug auf Leistung oder Stress).
Intergroup bias has been a pervasive phenomenon throughout human history, but its psychological underpinnings are still the subject of debate. The present work tests whether intergroup attitudes and behaviors are motivated by ingroup positivity, outgroup negativity, or both, across the first few years of life. In two studies (total N = 128), children were introduced to an ingroup doll and an outgroup doll, and interacted with each one independently in a resource allocation task. Toddlers showed both ingroup positivity and outgroup negativity (Study 1). Preschoolers shifted from this pattern, showing positivity and avoiding negativity toward both ingroup and outgroup members (Study 2). Together, these studies suggest that outgroup negativity plays a stronger role in motivating early intergroup bias than previously thought.
Throughout human history and across all human cultures, civilizations have organized themselves into social collectives, to the extent that it seems fair to say that social groups are the natural ecology of our species. In many ways, these groups play the same role as do categories in other domains; after all, the world is an incredibly complex place, and dividing it into categories is a powerful way to simplify this complexity and maximize efficiency in learning. In the social world, this way of working through complexity is especially important, given the extreme range of variability that exists across human individuals and communities. Children must navigate a world full of people with a range of properties that appear to have little in common with one another, posing a particularly difficult learnability problem. Social categorization allows children to work through this complexity by selecting features that denote meaningful differences between people (see Chapter 13). As a result, social categories become a fundamental lens through which we see the world.
This chapter highlights current research on the problem of prejudice among children, adolescents, and adults. Its manifestations, developmental patterns, health consequences, and solutions are discussed. A substantial body of evidence documents that prejudice persists in myriad forms among children, youth, and adults despite widely accepted norms regarding diversity and equality. Intergroup bias has early roots and children's attitudes are deeply responsive to their social environments. People who are targeted by prejudice are at an elevated risk for a host of mental and physical health challenges for both structural and psychological reasons. Interventions to promote intergroup respect among children and those professionals who work with them are reviewed. There is qualified support for the use of carefully structured intergroup contact, diversity and anti-bias education, cognitive practices, and more general supports for personal and community health. To be most effective, these initiatives need to be coupled with social justice work and implemented by those who themselves appreciate equity and diversity. Parents and professionals who work with children have an opportunity to harness and cultivate their early prosocial leanings before the roots prejudice take hold. Finally, some of the initiatives to challenge prejudice and promote respect backed by psychological research are compatible with supports for public health more broadly.
To successfully navigate their social world, humans need to understand and map enduring relationships between people: Humans need a concept of social affiliation. Here I propose that the initial concept of social affiliation, available in infancy, is based on the extent to which one individual consistently takes on the goals and needs of another. This proposal grounds affiliation in intuitive psychology, as formalized in the naive-utility-calculus model. A concept of affiliation based on interpersonal utility adoption can account for findings from studies of infants' reasoning about imitation, similarity, helpful and fair individuals, "ritual" behaviors, and social groups without the need for additional innate mechanisms such as a coalitional psychology, moral sense, or general preference for similar others. I identify further tests of this proposal and also discuss how it is likely to be relevant to social reasoning and learning across the life span.
Beginning in infancy, children expect individuals in a group to care for and be loyal to in-group members. One prominent cue that children use to infer that individuals belong to the same group is similarity. Does any salient similarity among individuals elicit an expectation of in-group preference, or does contextual information modulate these expectations? In Experiments 1 and 2, 12-month-old infants expected in-group preference between two individuals who wore the same novel outfit, but they dismissed this similarity if one of the outfits was used to fulfill an instrumental purpose. In Experiment 3, 26-month-old toddlers expected in-group preference between two individuals who uttered the same novel labels, but they dismissed this similarity if the labels were used to convey incidental as opposed to categorical information about the individuals. Together, the results of these experiments ( N = 96) provide converging evidence that from early in life, children possess a context-sensitive mechanism for determining whether similarities mark groups.
In four experiments, we explored children’s use of shared clothing style to infer grouplevel knowledge. In Experiment 1, 3-and 4-year-olds and 6-and-7-year-olds inferred that those wearing identical clothing (i.e., same style, color, and pattern) were likely to share the same knowledge, while those who wore different clothing were not. In Experiment 2, we introduce variation into the clothing to make it more difficult for children to use a similarity heuristic. In this case, 6-and-7-year-olds but not 3- and 4-year-olds, used clothing style to make inferences about shared knowledge. Using the same varied clothing styles, Experiment 3 demonstrates that 3-and 4-year-olds use clothing style to make other social inferences (i.e., about friendship choices), demonstrating that younger children are capable of making some social inferences based on shared clothing style. Finally, Experiment 4 tested the mechanism underlying older children's judgments. Namely, we manipulated the ownership status of the garment and found that when the same clothing style was worn by an owner, but not a borrower, older children inferred shared knowledge.
Ingroup favoritism and fairness are two potentially competing motives guiding intergroup behaviors in human. Here, we investigate if and how limited resources can modulate the way these two motives affect individuals’ decisions in intergroup situation. In the present study, participants (N = 58) were asked to accept or reject three types of resource allocation proposals generated by a computer: the ingroup advantageous condition, outgroup advantageous condition, and neutral condition. In general, participants were more willing to accept the proposals in the ingroup advantageous condition than the outgroup advantageous or the neutral conditions, and also in the moderate inequality than the extreme inequality condition. This may indicate that people sought a careful balance between ingroup favoritism and fairness, although we also found marked individual differences in their preferences for ingroup favoritism or fairness. Importantly, as predicted, participants were more likely to show ingroup favoritism only when limited resources affect the well-being of ingroup members. The present study provides novel insights into the situational and personality factors affecting human intergroup behaviors, shedding light on motives underlying intergroup conflicts prevalent in human societies.
Bize benzeyenleri sevmek insanın doğasında vardır. Bebekler bile kendi zevklerini paylaşan bireyleri tercih eder ve zıt görüşlere sahip olanlardan hoşlanmazlar. Ancak çoğulcu toplumumuz farklılıkları kabul etmeyi ve aynı fikirde olmayanlara tahammül etmeyi gerektirir. Bebek araştırmalarındaki bulgular çeşitliliği kabul etmeyi teşvik edecek stratejilerle ilgili bilgi verebilir mi?
These studies investigate the influence of adults’ explicit attention to commonalities of appearance on children's preference for individuals resembling themselves. Three findings emerged: (1) An adult's identification of 2 dolls’ respective similarity to and difference from the child led 3-year-olds to prefer the similar doll (Study 1, n = 32). (2) When the adult did not comment on similarity, children age 6 years but not younger preferred physically similar individuals (Study 2, n = 68), suggesting that a spontaneous preference for physically similar others does not emerge before school age. (3) Four- but not 3-year-olds generalized an adult's pedagogical cues about similarity, leading them to prefer a self-resembling doll in a new context (Study 3, n = 80). These findings collectively suggest that the preference for individuals resembling ourselves develops through a process of internalizing adults’ attention to, and messages about, similarities of appearance.
This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
The current study probed whether infants understand themselves in relation to others. Infants aged 16 to 26 months (n = 102) saw their parent wearing a sticker on their forehead or cheek, depending on experimental condition, placed unwitnessed by the child. Infants then received a sticker themselves, and their spontaneous behavior was coded. Regardless of age, from 16 months, all infants who placed the sticker on themselves, placed it on the location on their own face matching their parent's placement. This shows that infants as young as 16 months of age have an internal map of their face in relation to others that they can use to guide their behavior. Whether infants placed the sticker on their face was related to other measures associated with self-concept development (the use of their own name and mirror self-recognition), indicating that it may reflect a social aspect of children's developing self-concept, namely their understanding of themselves in relation and comparison to others. About half of the infants placed the sticker on themselves, while others put it elsewhere in the surrounding, indicating an additional motivational component to bring about on themselves the state which they observed on their parent. Together, infants’ placement of the sticker in our task suggests an ability to compare, and motivation to align, self and other.
This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
A dominant theme in the story of the American, city‐on‐a‐hill experience is manifest destiny, a term literally expressing a sense of a rightful, westward expansion across the continent in the late 19th century, but more broadly expressing a general entitlement granted, it is often understood, divinely to an exceptional United States of America. The origins, the political‐versus‐religious undergirding, and the implications of manifest destiny are widely discussed in the literature. Here I focus on three primary texts by John Winthrop, John O'Sullivan, and George W. Bush to argue that, even though Winthrop's and his fellow Puritan immigrants' understanding of their role in the new land was a far cry from that of O'Sullivan—who coined the term “manifest destiny” – the seeds of manifest destiny were brought with these first immigrants to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, later sprouting and blossoming in O'Sullivan's coining, and eventually bearing some of its many fruits Bush's foreign policy. Finally, I will discuss the sociological and other implications of the divine endorsement of such ideas.
Factors that make stories more or less similar to children’s lives may influence learning. One such factor, the similarity of characters in a story to its readers, may influence learning because of children’s social preference for similar others, because of stronger identification with similar characters, or because some types of similarity may indicate to children whether the story is relevant to their lives. The current studies examined the effects of two types of character similarity (race and gender) on 6- to 8-year-olds’ learning from stories to begin to disambiguate these possibilities. In Study 1, White children demonstrated greater learning on implicit measures (i.e., free recall) from a story with a White character versus a Black character. Although children said that they were more similar to and identified more strongly with a White character than a Black character, these factors did not predict learning. In Study 2, character gender did not influence learning or identification. Children showed preferences for own-race and own-gender playmates, but these preferences did not predict learning. These findings suggest that White children’s greater learning from the White character was not due to social preference for similar others or to stronger identification with the White character. One explanation for the divergent findings for race and gender is that, because of the differing roles of race and gender within U.S. society, children may use race but not gender as a cue as to whether the information provided in a story is relevant for them.
Despite the rise in prevalence of voice-activated smart devices and their potential to influence how young children learn about the world, we know little about how children interact with and learn from these devices. In the current study, 5- to 6-year-old children (n=30) were asked whether they wanted to learn more information about a series of obscure animals from an Amazon Echo or a human confederate. After informants gave contradictory answers, participants were asked whose information they trusted. Children significantly preferred to request information from the Amazon Echo but showed no preference with regards to whose information they endorsed. Furthermore, performance was not affected by technology experience. While children enjoy interacting with smart devices, they may not believe the information that they receive.
How do humans intuitively understand the structure of their society? How should psychologists study people's commonsense understanding of societal structure? The present chapter seeks to address both of these questions by describing the domain of “intuitive sociology.” Drawing primarily from empirical research focused on how young children represent and reason about social groups, we propose that intuitive sociology consists of three core phenomena: social types (the identification of relevant groups and their attributes); social value (the worth of different groups); and social norms (shared expectations for how groups ought to be). After articulating each component of intuitive sociology, we end the chapter by considering both the emergence of intuitive sociology in infancy as well as transitions from intuitive to reflective representations of sociology later in life.
Children tend to assume that their ingroup members are more likely to share their preferences than outgroup members, but group membership and shared preferences need not be congruent in reality. The current study investigated 76 3- to 6-year-old children’s baseline intergroup attitudes in a minimal group context and their subsequent attitudes after being informed that either (a) their ingroup, but not their outgroup, shared their preferences or (b) their outgroup, but not their ingroup, shared their preferences. Cues about shared preferences affected children’s intergroup biases to some extent, such that children tended to like their outgroup more and to allocate resources fairly among their ingroup and outgroup when they learned that their outgroup shared their preferences. However, intergroup biases were robust in some measures, such that children reported high ingroup liking and demonstrated ingroup favoritism in behavioral attribution regardless of whether they learned that their ingroup or outgroup shared their preferences. Children were also administered measures tapping into cognitive flexibility, but there was no coherent evidence that children’s cognitive flexibility was related to their initial intergroup attitudes or their subsequent intergroup attitudes after learning that their ingroup or outgroup shared their preferences. The current study demonstrates a nuanced picture of intergroup biases, such that these biases might not be entirely entrenched but can nonetheless be robust in the face of conflicting cues about group membership and shared preferences. Furthermore, the importance of investigating intergroup biases at the individual level, rather than only at the group level, is discussed.
Homophily structures human social networks: people tend to seek out or be attracted to those who share their preferences or values, and to generally expect social connections between similar people. Here, we probe the nature and extent of infants' homophilic thinking by asking whether infants can use information about other people's shared preferences in the absence of other socially relevant behaviors (e.g., their proximity or joint attention) to infer their affiliation. To do so, we present infants with scenarios in which two people either share a preference or have opposing preferences while varying (across studies) the degree to which those people engage in other socially relevant behaviors. We show that by 14 months of age, infants demonstrate clear inferences of homophily: they expect two people with a shared preference to be more likely to affiliate than two people without such similarity, even in the absence of other social behaviors that signal friendship. Although such cognition begins to emerge by 6-months, younger infants' inferences are bolstered by social behaviors that signal friendship. Thus, an abstract understanding that homophily guides third-party affiliation has its roots in the second year of life, and potentially earlier.
Many species of animals form social allegiances to enhance survival. Across disciplines, researchers have suggested that allegiances form to facilitate within group cooperation and defend each other against rival groups. Here, we explore humans' reasoning about social allegiances and obligations beginning in infancy, long before they have experience with intergroup conflict. In Experiments 1 and 2, we demonstrate that infants (17–19 months, and 9–13 months, respectively) expect a social ally to intervene and provide aid during an episode of intergroup conflict. Experiment 3 conceptually replicated the results of Experiments 1 and 2. Together, this set of experiments reveals that humans' understanding of social obligation and loyalty may be innate, and supported by infants' naïve sociology.
Along with genetics and genomics, the neurosciences currently share the dubious honor of being considered able to enlighten us on fundamental questions of human existence. One of these questions is the issue of sex/gender—in science, this boils down to an urge to explain whether women and men differ from each other. Comparisons of women versus men, along with distinctions related to racial or ethnic groups, have been among the most extensively investigated since the emergence of physical anthropology, psychopathology, and craniology in the nineteenth century. Yet despite the enthusiasm over empirical practices of knowledge production, the history of establishing sex/gender differences is both a history of failure and of constant renewal.
In the context of a study in social judgment, Ss were presented with eight stimulus persons, varying in attitude similarity (to S), physical attractiveness, and favorability as judged by others. Ss were asked to rate these persons on a measure of interpersonal attraction. It was hypothesized that attitude similarity would operate as an “open gate” in disposing the S to utilize the attractiveness and favorability information, whereas dissimilarity would reduce the impact of these cues. This hypothesis received fairly strong support. The Ss* agreement with traits attributed to the stimulus persons provided validity data for the attraction response, the form of the interaction effect again snowing greater utilization of additional stimulus information under conditions of similar, as opposed to dissimilar, stimulus persons.
Contrasting predictions ofByrne's similarity-attraction hypothesis and Rosenbaum's dissimilarity-repulsion hypothesis were tested with 7-, 11-, 15-, and 21-year-olds in Singapore. The study included a control condition of no-attitude information and two experimental conditions of similar and dissimilar attitudes. Measures of attraction, assumed similarity of attitudes, and accuracy in perceiving the manipulations were taken. The repulsion hypothesis was supported with the two younger groups; the attraction hypothesis was supported with the two older groups. The repulsion effect emerged because the two younger groups assumed a high level of attitudinal similarity in the control condition of no-attitude information and because they inaccurately perceived the manipulated similarity of attitudes in the experimental conditions. These results reaffirm the similarity-attraction hypothesis and further demonstrate the role of age-related cognitive processes in interpersonal attraction.
The theory of social comparison processes suggests that individuals are attracted to each other on the basis of similarity in opinions, abilities, and emotional state. Generalizing further, attraction was hypothesized to be a function of similarity-dissimilarity in economic status. 84 Ss were divided into high and low economic status on the basis of their responses to items dealing with spending money. 3 experimental conditions were devised in which Ss evaluated a stranger on the basis of his or her responses to the economic and some attitudinal items. In 1 condition, low-status Ss responded to a high-status stranger; in a 2nd condition, high-status Ss responded to a low-status stranger; and in a 3rd condition, high- and low-status Ss responded to strangers similar to themselves. As hypothesized, attraction was significantly (p < .001) affected by similarity-dissimilarity of economic status. It was found that the specific responses of Ss could be predicted on the basis of a law of attraction formula derived in earlier work on attitude similarity-dissimilarity. An attempt was made to account for the findings in reinforcement terms. (33 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Examined the consequences of mate preferences for the processes of assortative mating and sexual selection. In Study 1, 92 married couples (aged 18–40 yrs) completed measures such as the California Psychological Inventory, Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, and Personal Attributes Questionnaire. Data were used to identify (a) the mate characteristics that were consensually more and less desired, (b) the mate characteristics that showed strong sex differences in their preferred value, (c) the degree to which married couples were correlated in selection preferences, and (d) the relations between expressed preferences and the personality and background characteristics of obtained spouses. Marital preference factors included Religious, Kind/Considerate, Artistic/Intelligent, and Easygoing/Adaptable. Study 2, with 100 unmarried undergraduates, replicated the sex differences and consensual ordering of mate preferences found in Study 1, using a different methodology. Alternative hypotheses are presented to account for the replicated sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and earning potential. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT Although personality characteristics figure prominently in what people want in a mate, little is known about precisely which personality characteristics are most important, whether men and women differ in their personality preferences, whether individual women or men differ in what they want, and whether individuals actually get what they want. To explore these issues, two parallel studies were conducted, one using a sample of dating couples (N= 118) and one using a sample of married couples (N= 216). The five-factor model, operationalized in adjectival form, was used to assess personality characteristics via three data sources—self-report, partner report, and independent interviewer reports. Participants evaluated on a parallel 40-item instrument their preferences for the ideal personality characteristics of their mates. Results were consistent across both studies. Women expressed a greater preference than men for a wide array of socially desirable personality traits. Individuals differed in which characteristics they desired, preferring mates who were similar to themselves and actually obtaining mates who embodied what they desired. Finally, the personality characteristics of one's partner significantly predicted marital and sexual dissatisfaction, most notably when the partner was lower on Agreeableness, Emotional Stability, and Intellect-Openness than desired.
The aim of the studies was to assess the effefcs of social categorization on intergroup behaviour when, in the intergroup situation, neither calculations of individual interest nor previously existing attitudes of hostility could have been said to have determined discriminative behaviour against an outgroup. These conditions were satisfied in the experimental design. In the first series of experiments, it was found that the subjects favoured their own group in the distribution of real rewards and penalities in a situation in which nothing but the variable of fairly irrelevant classification distinguished between the ingroup and the outgroup. In the second series of experiments it was found that: 1) maximum joint profit independent of group membership did not affect significantly the manner in which the subjects divided real pecuniary rewards; 2) maximum profit for own group did affect the distribution of rewards; 3) the clearest effect on the distribution of rewards was due to the subjects' attempt to achieve a maximum difference between the ingroup and the outgroup even at the price of sacrificing other ‘objective’ advantages.The design and the results of the study are theoretically discussed within the framework of social norms and expectations and particularly in relation to a ‘generic’ norm of outgroup behaviour prevalent in some societies.
This research examined reasons for the frequently obtained finding that members of numerically minority groups exhibit greater intergroup discrimination than members of majority groups and also sought to determine the conditions under which members of both majority and minority groups exhibit intergroup discrimination. Experiment 1 examined the role of group identification and found that discrimination by members of a majority group was equivalent to that of minority group members when identification was experimentally induced. Experiments 2 and 3 examined further the underlying bases for minority and majority discrimination. Consistent with predictions derived from optimal distinctiveness theory (12), identification with the in-group was found to be a necessary condition underlying intergroup discrimination, but motivations for discrimination varied as a function of satisfaction with in-group size and distinctiveness.
Two studies examined the influence of similarity on 3-year-old children's initial liking of their peers. Children were presented with pairs of childlike puppets who were either similar or dissimilar to them on a specified dimension and then were asked to choose one of the puppets to play with as a measure of liking. Children selected the puppet whose food preferences or physical appearance matched their own. Unpacking the physical appearance finding revealed that the stable similarity of hair color may influence liking more strongly than the transient similarity of shirt color. A second study showed that children also prefer to play with a peer who shares their toy preferences, yet importantly, show no bias toward a peer who is similar on an arbitrary dimension. The findings provide insight into the earliest development of peer relations in young children.
Although personality characteristics figure prominently in what people want in a mate, little is known about precisely which personality characteristics are most important, whether men and women differ in their personality preferences, whether individual women or men differ in what they want, and whether individuals actually get what they want. To explore these issues, two parallel studies were conducted, one using a sample of dating couples (N = 118) and one using a sample of married couples (N = 216). The five-factor model, operationalized in adjectival form, was used to assess personality characteristics via three data sources-self--report, partner report, and independent interviewer reports. Participants evaluated on a parallel 40-item instrument their preferences for the ideal personality characteristics of their mates. Results were consistent across both studies. Women expressed a greater preference than men for a wide array of socially desirable personality traits. Individuals differed in which characteristics they desired, preferring mates who were similar to themselves and actually obtaining mates who embodied what they desired. Finally, the personality characteristics of one's partner significantly predicted marital and sexual dissatisfaction, most notably when the partner was lower on Agreeableness, Emotional Stability, and Intellect-Openness than desired.
Dissimilarity and similarity between attitudes of the participants and a stranger were manipulated across two sets of issues to test the attraction, repulsion and similarity-dissimilarity asymmetry hypotheses. Participants (N = 192) judged social (liking, enjoyment of company) and intellectual (intelligence, general knowledge) attractiveness of the stranger. The similarity in the first set of attitudes x similarity in the second set of attitudes effect emerged in social attraction, but not in intellectual attraction. Stated simply, dissimilarity had a greater weight than similarity in social attraction, but equal weight in intellectual attraction. These results support the similarity-dissimilarity asymmetry hypothesis that predicts dissimilarity-repulsion to be stronger than similarity-attraction. However, they reject (1) the attraction hypothesis that dissimilarity and similarity produce equal and opposite effects on social attraction; and (2) the repulsion hypothesis that only dissimilar attitudes affect social attraction by leading to repulsion. An equal weighting of dissimilarity and similarity in intellectual attraction further suggested that the similarity-dissimilarity asymmetry on social attraction is reflective of a stronger avoidance response in the Darwinian sense.
A standard visual preference task was used to examine 3-month-olds' looking times at own-race versus other-race faces as a function of environmental exposure to faces from the two categories. Participants were Caucasian infants living in a Caucasian environment, African infants living in an African environment, and African infants living in a predominantly Caucasian environment. The results indicate that preference for own-race faces is present as early as 3 months of age, but that this preference results from exposure to the prototypical facial environment.
Similarity of ego identity status, assessed by Marcia's four-category classification system, was related to interpersonal attraction. Using male and female college students as subjects, this study found that (1) while all judges preferred targets who had or who are undergoing a crisis to those who have not had a crisis, (2) diffuse judges preferred targets with no commitments to those with commitments, and (3) judges with commitments preferred a foreclosure target more than judges without commitments. Differential evaluations of the targets' intelligence, knowledge of current events, adjustment, and morality were also found. Results are discussed both in terms of previous research positively relating personality similarity to attraction and Erikson's theory of the relationship between ego identity development and intimacy in interpersonal relations.
Reviews studies on prejudice and children focusing on how children learn prejudice and what can be done to prevent it. Offers three activity and discussion ideas which can be used to develop children's awareness of inappropriate prejudgments. Identifies a selection of related instructional resources and includes a 34-item bibliography. (JDH)
This book presents a new theory of the social group which seeks to explain how individuals become unified into a group and capable of collective behaviour.
The book summarizes classic psychological theories of the group, describes and explains the important effects of group membership on social behaviour, outlines self-categorization theory in full and shows how the general perspective has been applied in research on group formation and cohesion, social influence, the polarization of social attitudes, crowd psychology and social stereotyping. The theory emerges as a fundamental new contribution to social psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Experimental research on intergroup discrimination in favor of one's own group is reviewed in terms of the basis of differentiation between in-group and out-group and in terms of the response measure on which in-group bias is assessed. Results of the research reviewed suggest that (a) factors such as intergroup competition, similarity, and status differentials affect in-group bias indirectly by influencing the salience of distinctions between in-group and out-group, (b) the degree of intergroup differentiation on a particular response dimension is a joint function of the relevance of intergroup distinctions and the favorableness of the in-group's position on that dimension, and (c) the enhancement of in-group bias is more related to increased favoritism toward in-group members than to increased hostility toward out-group members. Implications of these results for positive applications of group identification (e.g., a shift of in-group bias research from inter- to intragroup contexts) are discussed. (67 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Using a ‘near minimal ’ group paradigm (see Taifel et al., 1971), this research tested whether the reasons people think about following group categorization can account for the magnitude of ingroup bias. College students were randomly assigned to four conditions. These conditions instructed subjects either to think about reasons for ingroup choice (‘ingroup’ condition), outgroup choice (‘outgroup’), to think about anything they wanted (‘basic’), or to think about distracting activities (‘distraction’). The hypothesized ordering of ingroup bias and polarized attitudes was: ingroup > basic > distraction > outgroup. The results support both hypotheses. The meaning of these results are discussed in relation to social identity theory and Billig's (1985) rhetorical approach to prejudice.
Negotiations were conducted to investigate the effects on settlement-points andon the attitudes and perceptions of participants of (i) group participation and (ii)belief in own group's point of view, in a 2 × 2 factorial design. Ninety-six school children prepared cases in groups of four before representing their group's position against an individual of a similarly prepared opposed group. Group participation was manipulated by groups either participating in preparatory discussions or observing video films of another group's discussions. Belief was manipulated by systematically varying the composition of groups according to scores on a pre-test of attitudes towards the raising of the school-leaving age.
In general the belief manipulation operated as expected, ‘believers’ exhibiting less variability, more tit-for-tat agreements and less opinion change than the ‘disbelievers’. Group participation did not influence the measures as predicted, and measures of interpersonal perception did not conform to the pattern of findings in recent experiments on intergroup discrimination. The results are discussed in terms of (i) their relevance to the issue of the appropriate relationship of the representative to his group in a negotiation and (ii) their implications for intergroup relations theory.
This paper reports the results of a meta-analytic integration of the results of 137 tests of the ingroup bias hypothesis. Overall, the ingroup bias effect was highly significant and of moderate magnitude. Several theoretically informative determinants of the ingroup bias effect were established. This ingroup bias effect was significantly stronger when the ingroup was made salient (by virtue of proportionate size and by virtue of reality of the group categorization). A significant interaction between the reality of the group categorization and the relative status of the ingroup revealed a slight decrease in the ingroup bias effect as a function of status in real groups, and a significant increase in the ingroup bias effect as a function of status in artificial groups. Finally, an interaction between item relevance and ingroup status was observed, such that higher status groups exhibited more ingroup bias on more relevant attributes, whereas lower status groups exhibited more ingroup bias on less relevant attributes. Discussion considers the implications of these results for current theory and future research involving the ingroup bias effect.
These studies investigate whether group salience contributes to the greater in-group favouritism expressed by numerical minorities after intergroup cooperation, as compared with majorities. In Study 1, using real social categories, situationally heightened salience exacerbated bias only among numerical minorities. Using real social categories, Study 2 confirmed the predicted effect of numerical representation on a measure of group salience as well as measures of anxiety and cohesion. Study 3 created artificial groups of equal and unequal size. In this study, compared to majority status, numerical minority status induced stronger perceptions of in-group salience and cohesion as well as greater in-group bias. Moreover, a regression analysis supported the prediction that salience mediates greater in-group positivity among numerical minorities.
Intergroup attitudes were assessed in 7 and 10 years old European American and African American children from ethnically heterogeneous schools and in 7 and 10 years old European American children from ethnically homogeneous schools in order to test hypotheses about racial biases and judgments regarding cross-race peer interactions (N = 302). Using an Ambiguous Situations Task, the findings revealed that European American children attending homogeneous schools displayed racial bias in their interpretations of ambiguous situations as well as in their evaluations of cross-race friendship. Bias was not found, however, in the interpretations and evaluations of European American or African American children from heterogeneous schools. This study is the first to empirically demonstrate significant and direct relationships between intergroup contact in the school environment and children's intergroup biases as well as judgments about the potential for cross-race friendships. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The study was designed to test several hypotheses derived from intergroup theory concerning the effects of the presence of a novel social category on the formation of intergroup attitudes. Elementary school children (N = 61; aged 6–9) were given measures of classification skill and self-esteem and assigned to 1 of 3 types of school classrooms in which teachers made: (1) functional use of “blue” and “yellow” groups assigned on the basis of a biological attribute, (2) functional use of “blue” and “yellow” groups assigned on the basis of a random drawing, or (3) no explicit groups (despite the presence of blue and yellow groups). After 4 weeks, children completed measures of intergroup attitudes and behavior. As predicted, the functional use of color groups affected children's attitudes toward group members, with children showing consistent biases favoring their own group. Children with higher levels of self-esteem showed higher levels of intergroup stereotyping.
Implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes toward men and women and toward male soldiers and female soldiers were assessed in fifth-graders (28 male, 31 female) and college students (43 male, 42 female). Women were rated more positively than men on an explicit attitude measure. Similarly, female soldiers were rated more positively than male soldiers, except among college men, who were pro-male soldier. Different results emerged from an Implicit Association Test using names of men and women (general gender condition) or of male soldiers and female soldiers (soldier name condition). Latencies indicated pro-female attitudes in the soldier name condition and among women and college students. Error rates also indicated pro-female attitudes, except for a pro-male preference among men in the general gender condition. Reasons that implicit and explicit attitude measures may produce such divergent results are discussed.
Allport (1954) recognized that attachment to one's ingroups does not necessarily require hostility toward outgroups. Yet the prevailing approach to the study of ethnocentrism, ingroup bias, and prejudice presumes that ingroup love and outgroup hate are reciprocally related. Findings from both cross-cultural research and laboratory experiments support the alternative view that ingroup identification is independent of negative attitudes toward outgroups and that much ingroup bias and intergroup discrimination is motivated by preferential treatment of ingroup members rather than direct hostility toward outgroup members. Thus to understand the roots of prejudice and discrimination requires first of all a better understanding of the functions that ingroup formation and identification serve for human beings. This article reviews research and theory on the motivations for maintenance of ingroup boundaries and the implications of ingroup boundary protection for intergroup relations, conflict, and conflict prevention.
Previous studies have failed to find support for the hypothesis, derived from Level of Aspiration Theory, that individuals chose to date those whose “social desirability” level is similar to their own. In the present experiments, which were designed to test the matching hypothesis, the salience of possible rejection by the dating choice was varied. Both experiments found support for the principle of matching in social choice. This support was obtained, however, not just under conditions in which rejection was presumably salient but for all conditions of choice. This and additional findings were discussed.
The effect of the group on the individual is considered from the perspective of self-attention theory. It is proposed that group members will become more self-attentive, and thus become more concerned with matching to standards of appropriate behavior, as the relative size of their subgroup decreases. A simple algorithm, termed the Other-Total Ratio, is presented which numerically describes this effect of the group on the individual. An analysis of group effects on individuals' self-attention supports this perspective, as do analyses of the results of 42 previous studies in four other areas (conformity, prosocial behavior, social loafing, and antisocial behavior). This orientation to the effect of the group on the individual is linked to recent developments in self-attention theory and compared to Latané's social impact theory.
As adults, we know that others' mental states, such as beliefs, guide their behavior and that these mental states can deviate from reality. Researchers have examined whether young children possess adult-like theory of mind by focusing on their understanding about others' false beliefs. The present research revealed that 10-month-old infants seemed to interpret a person's choice of toys based on her true or false beliefs about which toys were present. These results indicate that like adults, even preverbal infants act as if they can consider others' mental states when making inferences about others' actions.
Three experiments (total N=140) tested the hypothesis that 5-year-old children's membership in randomly assigned "minimal" groups would be sufficient to induce intergroup bias. Children were randomly assigned to groups and engaged in tasks involving judgments of unfamiliar in-group or out-group children. Despite an absence of information regarding the relative status of groups or any competitive context, in-group preferences were observed on explicit and implicit measures of attitude and resource allocation (Experiment 1), behavioral attribution, and expectations of reciprocity, with preferences persisting when groups were not described via a noun label (Experiment 2). In addition, children systematically distorted incoming information by preferentially encoding positive information about in-group members (Experiment 3). Implications for the developmental origins of intergroup bias are discussed.
Mind Reading
One core component of social cognition, especially of the kind practiced by humans, is the capacity to formulate a representation of what someone else believes to be true, even if that belief is not anchored in reality. Holding two such beliefs in mind—one false and one true—is no simple feat, and up until a few years ago, it was generally accepted that such a capacity did not arise until children were 3 to 4 years old. Since then, a flurry of studies, using a variety of interrogation measures, has suggested that much-younger humans might, in fact, possess this capacity, commonly referred to as a theory of mind. Kovács et al. (p. 1830 ) devised an ingenious behavioral paradigm and applied it both to adults and to infants, which suggests that the representations of others' beliefs are indeed formed in the same way in adults and in infants.
The study was designed to test several hypotheses derived from intergroup theory concerning the effects of the presence of a novel social category on the formation of intergroup attitudes. Elementary school children (N = 61; aged 6-9) were given measures of classification skill and self-esteem and assigned to 1 of 3 types of school classrooms in which teachers made: (1) functional use of "blue" and "yellow" groups assigned on the basis of a biological attribute, (2) functional use of "blue" and "yellow" groups assigned on the basis of a random drawing, or (3) no explicit groups (despite the presence of blue and yellow groups). After 4 weeks, children completed measures of intergroup attitudes and behavior. As predicted, the functional use of color groups affected children's attitudes toward group members, with children showing consistent biases favoring their own group. Children with higher levels of self-esteem showed higher levels of intergroup stereotyping.
This study was designed to examine whether the presence of implicit links between social groups and high versus low status attributes affects the formation of intergroup attitudes. Elementary school children aged 7 to 12 years (N = 91) were given measures of classification skill and self-esteem, and assigned to one of three types of summer school classrooms in which teachers made (1) functional use of novel ("blue" and "yellow") social groups that were depicted via posters as varying in status, (2) no explicit use of novel social groups that were, nonetheless, depicted as varying in status, or (3) functional use of novel social groups in the absence of information about status. After 6 weeks, children completed measures of intergroup attitudes. Results indicated that children's intergroup attitudes were affected by the status manipulation when teachers made functional use of the novel groups. Children who were members of high-status (but not low-status) groups developed in-group biased attitudes.
Little is known about whether personality characteristics influence initial attraction. Because adult attachment differences influence a broad range of relationship processes, the authors examined their role in 3 experimental attraction studies. The authors tested four major attraction hypotheses--self similarity, ideal-self similarity, complementarity, and attachment security--and examined both actual and perceptual factors. Replicated analyses across samples, designs, and manipulations showed that actual security and self similarity predicted attraction. With regard to perceptual factors, ideal similarity, self similarity, and security all were significant predictors. Whereas perceptual ideal and self similarity had incremental predictive power, perceptual security's effects were subsumed by perceptual ideal similarity. Perceptual self similarity fully mediated actual attachment similarity effects, whereas ideal similarity was only a partial mediator.
A humor test composed of cartoons, comic strips, and jokes was administered to 30 college couples (26 single, 4 married) who rated them for humor. Subjects also stated how much they loved and liked their partner, their probability of marrying the partner, and filled out Rubin's Liking and Love Scales. The hypotheses were that similarity of rating of the humorous stimuli would be associated with loving, liking, and predisposition to marry. Hypotheses were confirmed.
To understand the origin and development of implicit attitudes, we measured race attitudes in White American 6-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and adults by first developing a child-oriented version of the Implicit Association Test (Child IAT). Remarkably, implicit pro-White/anti-Black bias was evident even in the youngest group, with self-reported attitudes revealing bias in the same direction. In 10-year-olds and adults, the same magnitude of implicit race bias was observed, although self-reported race attitudes became substantially less biased in older children and vanished entirely in adults, who self-reported equally favorable attitudes toward Whites and Blacks. These data are the first to show an asymmetry in the development of implicit and explicit race attitudes, with explicit attitudes becoming more egalitarian and implicit attitudes remaining stable and favoring the in-group across development. We offer a tentative suggestion that mean levels of implicit and explicit attitudes diverge around age 10.
This study was designed to examine the effects of adults' labeling and use of social groups on preschool children's intergroup attitudes. Children (N=87, aged 3-5) attending day care were given measures of classification skill and self-esteem and assigned to membership in a novel ("red" or "blue") social group. In experimental classrooms, teachers used the color groups to label children and organize the classroom. In control classrooms, teachers ignored the color groups. After 3 weeks, children completed multiple measures of intergroup attitudes. Results indicated that children in both types of classrooms developed ingroup-biased attitudes. As expected, children in experimental classrooms showed greater ingroup bias on some measures than children in control classrooms.
What leads humans to divide the social world into groups, preferring their own group and disfavoring others? Experiments with infants and young children suggest these tendencies are based on predispositions that emerge early in life and depend, in part, on natural language. Young infants prefer to look at a person who previously spoke their native language. Older infants preferentially accept toys from native-language speakers, and preschool children preferentially select native-language speakers as friends. Variations in accent are sufficient to evoke these social preferences, which are observed in infants before they produce or comprehend speech and are exhibited by children even when they comprehend the foreign-accented speech. Early-developing preferences for native-language speakers may serve as a foundation for later-developing preferences and conflicts among social groups.
• cognitive development
Challenging the view that implicit social cognition emerges from protracted social learning, research now suggests that intergroup preferences are present at adultlike levels in early childhood. Specifically, the pattern of developmental emergence of implicit attitudes is characterized by (i) rapidly emerging implicit preferences for ingroups and dominant groups and (ii) stability of these preferences across development. Together these findings demonstrate that implicit intergroup preferences follow a developmental course distinct from explicit intergroup preferences. In addition these results cast doubt on 'slow-learning' models of implicit social cognition according to which children should converge on adult forms of social cognition only as statistical regularities are internalized over a lengthy period of development.
Intergroup conflict and cooperation: The robbers cave experiment
- M Sherif
- O J Harvey
- B J White
- W R Hood
- C W Sherif
Sherif, M., Harvey, O. J., White, B. J., Hood, W. R., & Sherif, C. W. (1954/
1961). Intergroup conflict and cooperation: The robbers cave experiment.
Norman, OK: University Book Exchange.
Does intergroup contact reduce prejudice? Recent meta-analytic findings
- T F Pettigrew
- L R Tropp
Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2000). Does intergroup contact reduce
prejudice? Recent meta-analytic findings. In S. Oskamp (Ed.),
Reducing prejudice and discrimination: The Claremont Symposium
on Applied Social Psychology (pp. 93-114). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Developmental Origins of Ingroup Bias: Early Attitudes Towards Similar and Dissimilar Others. Talk presented at the XVIIth Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies Symposium: ''Infants' and Toddlers' Expectations About Social Groups
- N Mahajan
- K Wynn
Mahajan, N., & Wynn, K. (2010). Developmental Origins of Ingroup Bias: Early Attitudes Towards Similar and Dissimilar Others. Talk presented at the XVIIth Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies Symposium: ''Infants' and Toddlers' Expectations About Social Groups,'' Baltimore, MD.
Cognitive factors affecting the success of intergroup contact
- D A Wilder
Wilder, D. A. (1986). Cognitive factors affecting the success of intergroup
contact. In S. Worchel & W. G. Austin (Eds.), Intergroup relations
(pp. 49-66). Chicago: Nelson-Hall.
Interpersonal attraction
- E Berscheid
- E H Walster
Berscheid, E., & Walster, E. H. (1969). Interpersonal attraction. Addison-Wesley Publishing.