Groups as institutions: The use of constitutive rules to attribute group membership

Importance of Friendship and Minimal Group Membership in 4-6-Year-olds' and 9-12-Year-olds' Sharing Behavior in China

Strategies for favoring close others, such as friends and in-group members, benefit individuals and society. Although younger and older children apply these sharing strategies, how they integrate these relationships remain understudied. Friendship and group membership sometimes conflict (e.g. a friend from another, even a rival group), driving the question of how children behave in such situations. To address this question, this preregistered study recruited 121 4-6-year-olds and 94 9-12-year-olds from a middle-class community in China. A 2 (friend vs. stranger) by 2 (in vs. out-group) between-subjects design was applied per age group. Participants were asked to share seven objects with a recipient, who was either a stranger, or a previously nominated friend and from an in- or out-group (manipulated in the Minimal Group Paradigm). The results showed that children in both age groups shared more with friends than with strangers. However, only 4-6-year-olds shared more resources with in-group members than with out-group ones. Moreover, 4-6-year-olds did not distinguish between an out-group friend and an in-group stranger, while 9-12-year-olds shared more with an out-group friend relative to an ingroup stranger, indicating that friendship outweighs minimal group membership only among 9-12-year-olds. Furthermore, there was an interaction between age and minimal group membership, implying a decrease in the minimal group effect between 4-6-year-olds and 9-12-year-olds. Accordingly, the implications of friendship and minimal group effects, and their relative influence on sharing during childhood are discussed.

Cultural technologies for peace may have shaped our social cognition

Peace, the article shows, is achieved by culturally evolved institutions that incentivize positive-sum relationships. We propose that this insight has important consequences for the design of human social cognition. Cues that signal the existence of such institutions should play a prominent role in detecting group membership. We show how this accounts for previous findings and suggest avenues for future research.

Same people, different group: Social structures are a central component of group concepts

We examine whether people conceptualize organized groups as having at least two parts: In addition to members (e.g., Alice), they also have social structures (i.e., roles and relations). If groups have members and social structures, then numerically distinct groups can have the same members if they differ in their structures. In Studies 1-4, participants numerically distinguished groups that had the same members when they had different structures. Participants numerically distinguished even when groups had the same function-the same people playing chess together Monday and Tuesday can be numerically distinct groups. In Study 4, we compare clubs to tables, and find that participants numerically distinguish tables by their structures too (i.e., the configuration of their parts) even when they have the same parts (which can be disassembled and then reassembled with ease). In Study 5, we find that participants rate groups as existing in space and time like concrete objects, suggesting that participants represent groups as at least partially concrete, such that groups have at least two parts (their structures and their members). Finally, in Study 6, we show that people will judge the same person as exemplary with respect to one group but condemnable with respect to another-even when those groups have the same members.

A developmental investigation of group concepts in the context of social hierarchy: Can the powerful impose group membership?

Group membership is not always voluntary and can be imposed within a social context; moreover, those with power disproportionately shape group membership. We asked if children and adults view group membership as imposed by the powerful. We undertook four studies (465 children ages 4-9, 150 adults): Studies 1-2 used novel minimal groups; Study 3 used 'cool' and 'uncool'; Study 4 used novel ethnic groups. In the first three studies, children saw groups varying in power asserting that a non-categorized individual ought to belong to one of the operating groups in the context. Adults indicated that the declarations of the high-power group (and only the high-power group) made the individual a member of the declared group. Young children rejected that group membership could be imposed. In Study 4, children of all ages reasoned that the high-power group could decide membership for a consenting individual and impose clothing restrictions on a non-consenting individual; unlike adults, children of all ages did not reason the high-power group could impose group membership more frequently than chance. Taken together, adult participants consistently reasoned that group membership was imposed and disproportionately by those with power but children, more often than adults, reasoned that group membership was voluntary.

Triadic conflict "primitives" can be reduced to welfare trade-off ratios

Pietraszewski proposes four triadic "primitives" for representing social groups. We argue that, despite surface differences, these triads can all be reduced to similar underlying welfare trade-off ratios, which are a better candidate for social group primitives. Welfare trade-off ratios also have limitations, however, and we suggest there are multiple computational strategies by which people recognize and reason about social groups.

Evidence for multiple sources of inductive potential: Occupations and their relations to social institutions

Several current theories have essences as primary drivers of inductive potential: e.g., people infer dogs share properties because they share essences. We investigated the possibility that people take occupational roles as having robust inductive potential because of a different source: their position in stable social institutions. In Studies 1-4, participants learned a novel property about a target, and then decided whether two new individuals had the property (one with the same occupation, one without). Participants used occupational roles to robustly generalize rights and obligations, functional behaviors, personality traits, and skills. In Studies 5-6, we contrasted occupational roles (via label) with race/gender (via visual face cues). Participants reliably favored occupational roles over race/gender for generalizing rights and obligations, functional behaviors, personality traits, and skills (they favored race/gender for inferring leisure behaviors and physiological properties). Occupational roles supported inferences to the same extent as animal categories (Studies 4 and 6). In Study 7, we examined why members of occupational roles share properties. Participants did not attribute the inductive potential of occupational roles to essences, they attributed it to social institutions. In combination, these seven studies demonstrate that any theory of inductive potential must pluralistically allow for both essences and social institutions to form the basis of inductive potential.

Infants preferentially help individuals who label objects conventionally

Recent evidence suggests that infants engage in selective prosocial behavior toward some individuals over others; the ways in which infants are selective can illuminate the origins of prosocial behaviors. Here, we explored selective helping behavior, investigating whether a target recipient's prior adherence to, or defiance of, social conventions affects infants' subsequent likelihood of helping the target individual. 19-month-old infants (N = 120) participated in an interaction with an experimenter who correctly labeled common objects, incorrectly labeled objects, or labeled objects with nonsense English-like labels. Infants' rates of helping were higher when the experimenter adhered to labeling conventions than when she defied labeling conventions by either labeling objects incorrectly or using unfamiliar nonsense labels. The current study provides evidence that infants use information about adhering to conventions to guide their helping behavior. These findings help to document the ways in which infants are selective in their helping behavior as well as possible origins of prosocial obligations toward ingroup members.

The development of essentialist, ethnic, and civic intuitions about national categories

Given current global migration patterns, understanding of children's intuitions about nationality and national categories is an important and emerging focus for developmental psychologists. We review theoretical and empirical work on three different types of intuition: (1) that nationality is primarily determined by ancestry (an ethnic intuition); (2) that nationality is determined by commitment to national institutions (a civic intuition); and (3) that membership in a national category is determined by possession of an invisible essence which explains the similarities between members of that category. We examine assumptions about the relations which hold between all three intuitions and derive a series of questions about how these intuitions develop, how they relate to each other, and how they might be affected by children's experience. We describe a study (N=196) suggesting that (1) most children, regardless of experience, possess elements of both ethnic and civic intuitions, and (2) essentialist intuitions about national categories decrease with age and are not associated with ethnic intuitions. We conclude by outlining the implications of these results and a number of important questions which they raise.