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.

摘要

成人使用社会团体成员身份对新奇人的属性做出归纳推断，这种趋势在学龄前就已经很好地确立了。最近的证据表明，婴儿会注意与社交团体相关的特征，并使用社交团体成员身份来解释行为者的行为。当前的研究试图通过澄清婴儿在先前研究中的反应是否反映了“当下”社会团体成员的影响或关于代理人的特性和行为的归纳推断，来复制和扩展这些发现。具体而言，我们调查了20个月大的婴儿是否期望社会群体的成员具有共同的特征，即使目标代理人在没有其他群体成员的情况下独自行动也是如此。我们的研究结果表明，当婴儿属于同一个社会群体时，他们期望两个人分享食物偏好，但是对于两个不同社会群体的成员是否会分享食物偏好，他们没有期望。这些结果表明，到20个月大时，婴儿就可以使用社会团体成员资格来就新个体的属性做出归纳推断，即使该个体在没有其集体成员的情况下也能做出行动。