Collaborative and competitive motivations uniquely impact infants' racial categorization

Human history has been plagued by violent inter-group conflicts. Such conflicts are arguably grounded on group biases – particularly, a tendency to favor “ingroups” over “outgroups” – manifested in adults, children, and infants. A question these findings prompt is what motivates social categorizatio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEvolution and human behavior Vol. 39; no. 5; pp. 511 - 519
Main Authors Ferera, Matar, Baron, Andrew Scott, Diesendruck, Gil
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier Inc 01.09.2018
Subjects
Collaboration
Competition
Evolutionary psychology
Infancy
Social categorization
Social motivations
Competition
Evolutionary psychology
Social categorization
Infancy
Social motivations
Collaboration
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Summary:Human history has been plagued by violent inter-group conflicts. Such conflicts are arguably grounded on group biases – particularly, a tendency to favor “ingroups” over “outgroups” – manifested in adults, children, and infants. A question these findings prompt is what motivates social categorization? Here it is shown that priming 14-month-old infants (N = 144) with collaborative or competitive interactions affects their capacity to form racial categories, and that this effect varies according to the gender of the exemplars being categorized. Specifically, whereas racial categorization of women was facilitated by collaboration, racial categorization of men was facilitated by competition. The presence of these differential effects in infancy is consistent with the idea that social categorization is driven by fundamental functions of group relations.
ISSN:1090-5138
1879-0607
DOI:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.05.002