Abstract
Beginning in infancy, children expect individuals in a group to care for and be loyal to in-group members. One prominent cue that children use to infer that individuals belong to the same group is similarity. Does any salient similarity among individuals elicit an expectation of in-group preference, or does contextual information modulate these expectations? In Experiments 1 and 2, 12-month-old infants expected in-group preference between two individuals who wore the same novel outfit, but they dismissed this similarity if one of the outfits was used to fulfill an instrumental purpose. In Experiment 3, 26-month-old toddlers expected in-group preference between two individuals who uttered the same novel labels, but they dismissed this similarity if the labels were used to convey incidental as opposed to categorical information about the individuals. Together, the results of these experiments (
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
