Children's Use of Social Categories in Thinking About People and Social Relationships

Abstract

A series of studies investigated White U.S. 3- and 4-year-old children's use of gender and race information to reason about their own and others’ relationships and attributes. Three-year-old children used gender- but not race-based similarity between themselves and others to decide with whom they wanted to be friends, as well as to determine which children shared their own preferences for various social activities. Four-year-old (but not younger) children attended to gender and racial category membership to guide inferences about others’ relationships but did not use these categories to reason about others’ shared activity preferences. Taken together, the findings provide evidence for three suggestions about these children's social category-based reasoning. First, gender is a more potent category than race. Second, social categories are initially recruited for first-person reasoning but later become broad enough to support third-person inferences. Finally, at least for third-person reasoning, thinking about social categories is more attuned to social relationships than to shared attributes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research was supported by National Institutes of Health Grant HD23103 to Elizabeth S. Spelke.

The authors thank Margaret Arnold, Marissa Martinez, and Caitlin McKee for assistance with data collection.

Notes

Note. Asterisks indicate that performance was above chance according to one-sample t-tests; “ns” indicates that performance did not differ from chance.

Note. Cells with at least 18 participants would be significantly above chance according to a one-sample binomial test.

Note. Cells with at least 23 participants are significantly above chance according to one-sample binomial tests.