Children’s understanding of abstract and real-world social groups

The present work explores how two intuitive theories inform young children’s inferences about social groups. In three studies (N = 821), we tested whether 3- to 7-year-old children view novel (Studies 1 and 3), gender (Studies 2 and 3), and racial (Studies 2 and 3) groups as (a) marking individuals who are fundamentally similar to one another, and (b) marking patterns of social relationships and interactions. We found evidence for both of these sets of beliefs. Children predicted that ingroup members would be more similar to one another than outgroup members for all of the groups tested. Children also predicted that novel group members would be friends with one another, would be nice to one another, and would avoid harming one another, and predictions regarding gender and racial groups increasingly followed patterns similar to predictions about novel groups across development. We also found preliminary evidence that individual differences among children inform the ways in which children develop their expectations of intergroup interaction. These findings suggest that children combine their abstract knowledge with their understanding of groups in the real world to navigate the complex social world that they inhabit.