20-month-olds Use Social Categories to Make Inductive Inferences about Agents’ Preferences

ABSTRACT

Adults use social-group membership to make inductive inferences about the properties of novel individuals, and this tendency is well established by the preschool years. Recent evidence suggests that infants attend to features associated with social groups and use social-group membership to interpret an agents’ actions. The current study sought to replicate and extend these findings by clarifying whether infants’ responses in prior studies reflected “in the moment” influences of social-group membership or inductive inferences about agents’ properties and behaviors. Specifically, we investigated whether 20-month-old infants expect members of a social group to share characteristics, even when the target agent acts alone in the absence of other group members. Our results demonstrated that infants expected two individuals to share food preferences when they belonged to the same social group, but they had no expectations about whether members of two different social groups would share food preferences. These results suggest that by 20 months of age, infants use social-group membership to make inductive inferences about the properties of novel individuals, even when that individual is acting in the absence of its group members.

Acknowledgments

We thank Anne Warlaumont and Jeffrey Gilger for their helpful discussions, Jacqueline Pagobo, Virgina Vieira and the staff of the University of California Merced Center for Early Cognition and Language for their assistance with data collection, and the parents and children who participated in the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Inclusion of this outlier does not change the patterns of significance reported in the Results section.

² Buresh and Woodward (2007) tested 8 infants in their actor-discrimination condition.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Hatano Cognitive Development Fellowship to MS and grants from the Hellman Fellows Fund and the University of California Merced Committee on Research to RS.