Probing the impact of exposure to diversity on infants' social categorization.

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

Expectations of intergroup empathy bias emerge by early childhood.

Across two preregistered studies with children (3-12-year-olds; N = 356) and adults (N = 262) from the United States, we find robust expectations for intergroup empathic biases. Participants predicted that people would feel better about ingroup fortunes than outgroup fortunes and worse about ingroup misfortunes than outgroup misfortunes. Expectations of empathic bias were stronger when there was animosity and weaker when there was fondness between groups. The largest developmental differences emerged in participants' expectations about how others feel about outgroup misfortunes, particularly when there was intergroup animosity. Whereas young children (3-5-year-olds) generally expected people to feel empathy for the outgroup (regardless of the relationship between the groups), older children (9-12-year-olds) and adults expected Schadenfreude (feeling good when an outgroup experiences a misfortune) when the groups disliked one another. Overall, expectations of empathic biases emerge early but may be weaker when there are positive intergroup relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Shared social groups or shared experiences? The effect of shared knowledge on children's perspective-taking.

Although the ability to consider others' visual perspectives to interpret ambiguous communication emerges during childhood, people sometimes fail to attend to their partner's perspective. Two studies investigated whether 4- to 6-year-olds show a "closeness-communication bias" in their consideration of a partner's perspective in a communication task. Participants played a game that required them to take their partner's visual perspective in order to interpret an ambiguous instruction. If children, like adults, perform worse when they overestimate the extent to which their perspective is aligned with that of a partner, then they should make more perspective-taking errors when interacting with a socially close partner compared with a more socially distant partner. In Study 1, social closeness was based on belonging to the same social group. In Study 2, social closeness was based on caregiving, a long-standing social relationship with a close kinship bond. Although social group membership did not affect children's consideration of their partner's perspective, children did make more perspective-taking errors when interacting with a close caregiver compared with a novel experimenter. These findings suggest that close personal relationships may be more likely to lead children to overestimate perspective alignment and hinder children's perspective-taking than shared social group membership, and they highlight important questions about the mechanisms underlying the effects of partner characteristics in perspective-taking tasks.

Young children apply the homophily principle to their reasoning about social relationships.

People who are in close relationships tend to do and like the same things, a phenomenon termed the "homophily principle." The present research probed for evidence of the homophily principle in 4- to 6-year-old children. Across two experiments, participants (N = 327; 166 girls, 161 boys; located in the Midwestern United States) were asked to predict the closeness of two people based on their preferences. Participants in Experiment 1 indicated that people with a shared preference or a shared dispreference were more closely affiliated than people whose preferences diverged, suggesting inferences of homophily. Furthermore, children were not only relying on the emotional valences expressed: They expected people with a shared preference to be closer than people who expressed positive emotions about different items and expected people with a shared dispreference to be closer than people who expressed negative emotions about different items. Experiment 2 replicated and extended the main findings of Experiment 1 with more naturalistic stimuli. The present studies provide strong evidence that young children apply the homophily principle to their reasoning about social relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Infants' learning from distinct negative emotions.

Here we investigated infants' developing ability to use emotional expressions as signals that guide their learning about objects. To do so, we presented 16- to 21-month-old infants (N = 99) with actors who conveyed anger, fear, or pain, and tested infants' generalization of others' emotional expressions (Study 1) and infants' exploration of objects (Study 2). Our findings suggest that infants attend to the information conveyed by emotional expressions: When two expressions provide different information (e.g., one conveys threat, and the other does not), infants treated those emotions differently, even if they were both negative. Specifically, infants were more likely to generalize negative emotional expressions that conveyed threat compared to nonthreatening negative emotions (Study 1) and were more likely avoid interacting with potentially threatening items compared to items that were merely evaluated negatively (Study 2). But, when two emotional expressions provided the same information (e.g., that an item was threatening) infants responded similarly to those two emotions (Study 1). These findings are in line with evolutionary theories, which posit that emotions are critical information signals that can be used to learn about the world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Children use race to infer who is "in charge".

Children must navigate multifaceted social hierarchies to make sense of the social world. Whereas race and social status covary in many societies, minimal research has examined whether children use race as a status marker. Across three studies, we asked 3- to 11-year-old American children (N = 646) to determine which of two models was "in charge" while varying the models' race and posture cues. When the cue of race was presented individually (Study 1), children used it to derive their status inferences. That is, they expected a White model to more likely be "in charge" than a Black model. However, when the cue of race was presented in conjunction with conflicting posture cues (Study 3), children relied more heavily on posture to determine who was in "in charge." Thus, whereas children have learned the association between White and higher status from their community, they understand that other cues may be more indicative of social status.

It takes two (or more): The social nature of secrets.

The lion's share of research on secrecy focuses on how deciding to keep or share a secret impacts a secret-keeper's well-being. However, secrets always involve more than one person: the secret-keeper and those from whom the secret is kept or shared with. Although secrets are inherently social, their consequences for people's reputations and social relationships have been relatively ignored. Secrets serve a variety of social functions, including (1) changing or maintaining one's reputation, (2) conveying social utility, and (3) establishing friendship. For example, if Beth has a secret about a past misdemeanor, she might not tell any of her friends in order to maintain her reputation as an outstanding citizen. If Beth does share this secret with her friend Amy, Amy could interpret this as a sign of trust and think that their friendship is special. However, Amy could also choose to share Beth's secret with the rest of the friend group to show that she is a useful member with access to valuable information about others. Attention to these social functions of secrets emerges from a young age, and secrets play a prominent role in human relationships throughout the lifespan. After providing an overview of what is currently known about the relational consequences of secrecy in childhood and adulthood, we discuss how social and developmental psychologists could work together to broaden our understanding of the sociality of secrets. Future steps include incorporating more dyadic and social network analyses into research on secrets and looking at similar questions across ages. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making.

Origins of homophily: Infants expect people with shared preferences to affiliate.

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.

Social identity and contamination: Young children are more willing to eat native contaminated foods.

Ingesting dangerous substances can lead to illness, or even death, meaning that it is critical for humans to learn how to avoid potentially dangerous foods. However, young children are notoriously bad at choosing foods; they are willing to put nonfoods and disgust elicitors into their mouths. Because food choice is inherently social, we hypothesized that social learning and contamination might separately influence children's decisions about whether to eat or avoid a food. Here, we asked how children reason about foods that are contaminated by someone from within versus outside their culture. We presented 3- to 11-year-olds (N = 534) with videos of native and foreign speakers eating snacks. In Studies 1a and 1b, one speaker contaminated her food and the other did not, and we asked children (a) which food they would prefer to eat, (b) how germy each food was, and (c) which food would make them sick. Although children rated the contaminated food as germier regardless of whether it was contaminated by a foreign speaker (Study 1a) or by a native speaker (Study 1b), children were more likely to report that they would avoid eating foreign contaminated food compared with native contaminated food. In Study 2, we used a non-forced-choice method and found converging evidence that children attend to both culture and contamination when making food choices but that with age they place more weight on contamination status.

Keep the cat in the bag: Children understand that telling a friend's secret can harm the friendship.

Secrets play a powerful role in human social relationships. Here, we examine the developmental trajectory of 3- to 10-year-old children's (N = 630) expectations about (a) how relationships impact whether people will keep secrets, and (b) how relationships are impacted when a confidee keeps versus tells a confider's secret. Sophisticated expectations about the role of secrets in relationship maintenance develop across childhood. In particular, school-age children (6- to 10-year-olds) expect friends to be more likely to keep each other's secrets than nonfriends (Study 1), and expect that if a friend breaks this norm and shares his friend's secret with a third-party, it will harm the friendship (Studies 2 and 3). These expectations were specific to inferences about secrets: school-age children did not expect that sharing (or keeping) a friend's fact or surprise would impact the friendship strength (Studies 2 and 3). These findings did not hold for preschoolers (3- to 5-year-olds), who did not have clear expectations linking secret sharing to friendship strength. Taken together, our results indicate that by 6 years of age, children understand that social relationships can increase people's obligations to keep each other's secrets, and that failing to do so can harm the relationship. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Even his friend said he's bad: Children think personal alliances bias gossip.

Children learn about other people through gossip. Although gossip can be a valuable and efficient way to learn about others, evaluating gossip's credibility requires understanding when people may be biased, and using this information to update the truth-value placed on the gossip. For instance, people may be motivated to improve their and their friends' reputations (or to worsen their enemies' reputations). Therefore, testimony that cuts against these social motivations may be more credible. Here, in four studies with 3- to 13-year-old children (total N = 860), we examined (1) children's expectations about the type of gossip people were likely to spread about friends versus enemies, and (2) children's ability to discount testimony that is in line with a speaker's social biases (e.g., negative testimony about a friend). We found that children expect speakers to say nice things about their friends, and mean things about their enemies. And, children were less likely to endorse potentially biased testimony, though the strength of their ability to avoid endorsing biased testimony varied based on the domain of testimony. Overall, these studies suggest that children expect a speaker's testimony to be systematically biased based on her relationships. Our results underscore the importance of tracking and using relationships when evaluating testimony, because relationships have immense power for helping us effectively make sense of an ambiguous world.

A lifelong preoccupation with the sociality of moral obligation.

Tomasello provides compelling evidence that children understand that people are morally obligated toward members of their social group. We call for expanding the scope of inquiry to encompass the full developmental trajectory of humans' understanding of the relation between moral obligation, sociality, and stancetaking in interaction. We suggest that humans display a lifelong preoccupation with the sociality of moral obligation.

(Un)common knowledge: Children use social relationships to determine who knows what.

Socially savvy individuals track what they know and what other people likely know, and they use this information to navigate the social world. We examine whether children expect people to have shared knowledge based on their social relationships (e.g., expecting friends to know each other's secrets, expecting members of the same cultural group to share cultural knowledge) and we compare children's reasoning about shared knowledge to their reasoning about common knowledge (e.g., the wrongness of moral violations). In three studies, we told 4- to 9-year-olds (N = 227) about what a child knew and asked who else knew the information: The child's friend (Studies 1-3), the child's schoolmate (Study 1), another child from the same national group (Study 2), or the child's sibling (Study 3). In all three studies, older children reliably used relationships to infer what other people knew. Moreover, with age, children increasingly considered both the type of knowledge and an individual's social relationships when reporting who knew what. The results provide support for a 'Selective Inferences' hypothesis and suggest that children's early attention to social relationships facilitates an understanding of how knowledge transfers - an otherwise challenging cognitive process.

Children use similarity, propinquity, and loyalty to predict which people are friends.

Friendship fundamentally shapes interactions, and predicting other people's affiliations is crucial for effectively navigating the social world. We investigated how 3- to 11-year-old children use three cues to reason about friendship: propinquity, similarity, and loyalty. In past work, researchers asked children to report on their own friendships and found a shift from an early focus on propinquity to a much later understanding of the importance of loyalty. Indeed, attention to loyalty was not standard until adolescence. Across four studies (total N = 900), we used a simpler method in which we asked children to make a forced-choice decision about which of two people a main character was better friends with. Although we replicated the finding that understanding the importance of loyalty increases with age, we also found evidence that even the youngest children tested (3- to 5-year-olds) can use loyalty to predict friendship. Thus, a sophisticated understanding of how social interactions unfold differently between friends and nonfriends may be evident by the preschool years. We also discuss interesting developmental differences in how children weigh the importance of each of these friendship cues.

Secret to friendship: Children make inferences about friendship based on secret sharing.

Secrets carry valuable social information. Because the content of secrets can be damaging to the secret-keeper's reputation, people should only disclose their secrets to people whom they trust. Therefore, tracking which people know each other's secrets can be used as cue of social relationships: If one person tells another person a secret, those people are likely friends. Here, in 5 studies with 3- to 12-year-old children (total N = 452), we examined the developmental trajectory of reasoning about secret sharing as an indication of third-party friendship. By age 6, but not before, children expected that a person would be friends with someone that she told a secret. We replicated this main finding across four studies by comparing secret sharing to other cues of affiliation. Children treated sharing a secret as a stronger cue to friendship than sharing a physical object (Study 1), sharing a fact (Studies 2-4), or sharing membership on the same sports team (Study 3). Although younger children did not understand that secret sharing indicated friendship, they did expect people to be more likely to disclose their secrets to friends than to nonfriends (Study 5). Taken together, our results indicate that children understand the social significance of sharing secrets and use secret sharing to make important predictions about the social world. Specifically, children infer social relationships based on which people know each other's secrets and expect others to share secrets selectivity with friends. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Understanding the development of folk-economic beliefs.

Developmental psychology can shed light on (1) the intuitive systems that underlie folk-economic beliefs (FEBs), and (2) how FEBs are created and revised. Boyer & Petersen (B&P) acknowledge the first, but we argue that they do not seriously consider the second. FEBs vary across people (and within a person), and much of this variation may be explained by socialization, social context, and social learning.

Feeling out a link between feeling and infant sociomoral evaluation.

Recent research has shown that infants selectively approach prosocial versus antisocial characters, suggesting that foundations of sociomoral development may be present early in life. Despite this, to date, the mental processes involved in infants' prosocial preferences are poorly understood. To explore a possible role of emotions in early social evaluations, the current studies examined whether four samples of infants and toddlers express different emotional reactions after observing prosocial (giving) versus antisocial (taking) events. Experimentally blind coders rated infants' and toddlers' emotional reactions to prosocial and antisocial interactions from video using a 1- to 7-point Likert scale of negative to positive emotion; reactions were rated as more positive after viewing prosocial compared to antisocial interactions in three of four samples. While the observed effects were small, a single-paper meta-analysis suggests that the findings are robust and stable across age. These results support the possibility that emotional reactions play some role in infants' sociomoral evaluations. Statement of contribution What is already known Infants prefer prosocial to antisocial individuals from the first year of life. Emotion plays some role in the sociomoral judgments of children and adults. What this study adds Infants and toddlers express more positive reactions after observing prosocial giving versus antisocial taking acts, though observed effect sizes are small. Naïve coders can predict at a better than chance rate what type of act an infant or toddler just viewed based on their facial expressions. Provides the first evidence that emotion plays some to-be-specified role in infants' and toddlers' sociomoral evaluations.

Children's expectations about conventional and moral behaviors of ingroup and outgroup members.

Although children demonstrate robust social preferences for ingroup members early in ontogeny, it is not yet clear whether these preferences are based on children generally liking people who are more familiar or on children holding specific biased beliefs about people in their ingroup as compared with people in their outgroup. Here, we investigated the origins of humans' propensity to link ingroup members with positive behaviors and outgroup members with negative behaviors by asking whether linguistic group membership influences children's expectations of how people will act. Our findings indicate that the effect of group membership on children's expectations about other people's actions varies across both domain (moral and conventional) and age. Whereas all children in our study (3- to 11-year-olds) expected ingroup members to be more likely to conform to social conventions and expected outgroup members to be more likely to break conventional rules, only older children (7- to 11-year-olds) used social group membership to form expectations about which people would be more likely to act morally versus immorally. Thus, younger children do not automatically form biased character judgments based on group membership, although they do understand that social group membership is particularly relevant for reasoning about which people will be more likely to act in line with social norms.

The early social significance of shared ritual actions.

Many rituals are socially stipulated such that engaging in a group's rituals can fundamentally signal membership in that group. Here, we asked whether infants infer information about people's social affiliation based on whether those people perform the same ritualistic action versus different actions. We presented 16-month-old infants with two people who used the same object to achieve the same goal: turning on a light. In a first study, the actions that the actors used to turn on the light had key properties of ritual: they were not causally necessary to reach the overall goal, and there were no features of the situation that required doing the particular actions. We varied whether the two actors performed the same action or performed different actions to turn on the light. Infants expected people who used the same ritualistic action to be more likely to affiliate than people who used different actions. A second study indicated that these results were not due to perceptual similarity: when the differences in the actors' actions were not marked by properties of ritual, but were instead due to situational constraints, infants expected the actors to affiliate. Thus, infants understand the social significance of people engaging in common, potentially ritualistic actions, and expect these actions to provide information about third-party social relationships.

The Origins of Social Categorization.

Forming conceptually-rich social categories helps people to navigate the complex social world by allowing them to reason about the likely thoughts, beliefs, actions, and interactions of others, as guided by group membership. Nevertheless, social categorization often has nefarious consequences. We suggest that the foundation of the human ability to form useful social categories is in place in infancy: social categories guide the inferences infants make about the shared characteristics and social relationships of other people. We also suggest that the ability to form abstract social categories may be separable from the eventual negative downstream consequences of social categorization, including prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping. Although a tendency to form inductively-rich social categories appears early in ontogeny, prejudice based on each particular category dimension may not be inevitable.