Social categorization involves two crucial processes: First, children seek properties on which they can categorize individuals, i.e., they learn to form social categories; then children make inferences based on social category membership and might develop affective responses toward social categories. Over the last decade, a growing number of research in developmental psychology started to use novel social categories to investigate how children learn and reason about social categories. To date, three types of cues have been put forward as means to form social categories, namely linguistic, visual, and behavioral cues. Based on social category membership, children draw inferences about the shared properties of social category members and about how social category members ought to behave and interact with each other. With additional input, children might apply essentialist beliefs to social categories and develop affective responses toward social categories. This article aims to provide key insights on the development of stereotypes and intergroup biases by reviewing recent works that investigated how children learn to form novel social categories and the kind of inferences they make about these novel social categories.

社会分类涉及两个关键过程：首先，儿童寻找可以对个体进行分类的属性，即他们学会形成社会类别；然后，儿童根据社会类别成员身份做出推论，并可能对社会类别产生情感反应。在过去的十年中，越来越多的发展心理学研究开始使用新颖的社会类别来调查儿童如何学习和推理社会类别。迄今为止，已经提出了三种类型的线索作为形成社会类别的手段，即语言线索、视觉线索和行为线索。根据社会类别成员资格，孩子们可以推断出社会类别成员的共同属性以及社会类别成员应该如何表现和互动。通过额外的输入，孩子们可能会将本质主义信念应用于社会类别，并对社会类别产生情感反应。本文旨在通过回顾最近研究儿童如何学习形成新的社会类别以及他们对这些新的社会类别做出的推论的研究，提供关于刻板印象和群体间偏见的发展的重要见解。