Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research suggests that preschool children expectmembers of social groups to share stable, inherentcharacteristics (e.g., Waxman, 2013). Here we explored theorigins of these social-group based inferences by examiningwhether infants generalize food preferences across membersof an arbitrary social group. Experiment 1 demonstrated thatinfants expected two individuals to share food preferenceswhen they belonged to the same social group, but not whenthey belonged to two different social groups. Experiment 2replicated and extended these findings to social groups thatwere labeled with adjectives instead of nouns. These resultssuggest that by 20 months of age, infants use social-groupmembership to make inductive inferences about the behaviorof group members.