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.

Subjectivity and social constitution: Contrasting conceptions of institutions, artifacts, and animals.

We systematically compared beliefs about animal (e.g., lion), artifactual (e.g., hammer), and institutional (e.g., police officer) categories, aiming to identify whether people draw different inferences about which categories are subjective and which are socially constituted. We conducted two studies with 270 American children, ages 4 through 10: 140 girls, 129 boys, one not reported; 59% White, 3% Black, 10% Asian, one Native American, 17% multiracial or another race, 11% unreported. We also conducted two studies with 360 American adults recruited from Amazon mechanical Turk. In all four studies we found that children and adults judged institutional categories as more socially constituted than artifactual categories (in all studies) but as less subjective (in three of four studies). Whereas younger and older children's beliefs about subjectivity were similar, younger and older children expressed different beliefs about social constitution. Young children judged none of the category domains as socially constituted; older children differentiated between the three domains. These results support the conceptual independence of subjectivity and social constitution and suggest that concepts of institutions and artifacts differ. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

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.

There is no privileged link between kinds and essences early in development.

According to the dominant view of category representation, people preferentially infer that kinds (richly structured categories) reflect essences. Generic language ("Boys like blue") often occupies the central role in accounts of the formation of essentialist interpretations-especially in the context of social categories. In a preregistered study (n = 240 American children, ages 4 to 9 y), we tested whether children assume essences in the presence of generic language or whether they flexibly assume diverse causal structures. Children learned about a novel social category described with generic statements containing either biological properties or cultural properties. Although generic language always led children to believe that properties were nonaccidental, young children (4 or 5 y) in this sample inferred the nonaccidental structure was socialization. Older children (6 to 9 y) flexibly interpreted the category as essential or socialized depending on the type of properties that generalized. We uncovered early-emerging flexibility and no privileged link between kinds and essences.

Institutional actors: Children's emerging beliefs about the causal structure of social roles.

Institutions make new forms of acting possible: Signing executive orders, scoring goals, and officiating weddings are only possible because of the U.S. government, the rules of soccer, and the institution of marriage. Thus, when an individual occupies a particular social role (president, soccer player, and officiator), they acquire new ways of acting on the world. The present studies investigated children's beliefs about institutional actions, and in particular whether children understand that individuals can only perform institutional actions when their community recognizes them as occupying the appropriate social role. Two studies (Study 1, N = 120 children, ages 4-11; Study 2, N = 90 children, ages 4-9) compared institutional actions to standard actions that do not depend on institutional recognition. In both studies, 4- to 5-year-old children believed all actions were possible regardless of whether an individual was recognized as occupying the social role. In contrast, 8- to 9-year-old children robustly distinguished between institutional and standard actions; they understood that institutional actions depend on collective recognition by a community. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Dangerous and distinctive properties bias category judgments late in development.

When faced with entities with potentially ambiguous category membership, adult category judgments are strongly biased toward dangerous and distinctive properties. For example, a cyanide-water mixture is categorized as cyanide. We used a developmental approach to better understand this cross-domain effect, which we term the asymmetric categorization of mixtures (ACM). According to ACM, attention is biased toward perceived dangerous or distinctive properties, making them prominent in conceptual representation. We consider whether ACM is driven entirely by low-level processes of attention, or whether ACM might require the integration of attention with causal-explanatory reasoning. We argue that ACM requires forms of reasoning that only emerge robustly in middle childhood. Across three studies (N = 270), we find that ACM emerges only after the 7th year for liquids (Studies 1 through 3), and even later for race (Studies 1 and 3). Results are discussed in terms of competing theoretical accounts of ACM. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Collective recognition and function in concepts of institutional social groups.

We investigate ordinary concepts of institutional groups: stable, cooperative, and socially constructed entities like clubs, companies, and academic departments. We use a transformation paradigm to examine participants' causal beliefs about how groups exist and persist over time. We consider whether participants believe groups are grounded in collective recognition or function. Participants' default views about groups see them as persisting because the members or a relevant third-party collectively recognize the members as belonging to a group (Studies 1-4). Social groups are dual-character though (Studies 5-8). There is a second sense: the true group. This true judgment is grounded in whether the group realizes its basic function. This sense is more influenced by participants' own ideological commitments. Thus, participants can disagree about whether a group truly exists even if they agree about the bare facts. We discuss implications for theories of conceptual representation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

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

Across four experiments we tested children's (N = 229, aged 4-9) beliefs about what makes an individual a member of a group. One model (groups as institutions) predicts children believe groups are based on constitutive rules, i.e. collectively agreed-upon rules that ground membership. Another model (groups as social network) predicts children believe groups are based on patterns of social relationships. We tested whether and to what extent children rely on constitutive rules to attribute group membership. We found that young children can reason about constitutive rules as a means of becoming a group member, and their reasoning about constitutive rules is relatively sophisticated (Studies 1-3). But, when constitutive rules are pitted against friendship, young children (4-5) prioritize friendship and older children (6-9) prioritize constitutive rules. Therefore, both models contribute to the understanding of children's concepts of social groups across development.

Generics designate kinds but not always essences.

People believe that some categories are kinds with reliable causal structure and high inductive potential (e.g., tigers). Widely endorsed theories propose that people are biased to assume kinds are essential, and so naturally determined by internal causal properties. Generic language (e.g., "men like sports") is 1 mechanism thought to evoke this bias. We propose instead that generics principally designate that categories are kinds. Participants can entertain diverse causal structures in the presence of generics: Hearing that biological properties generalize to a category (e.g., "men grow beards") prompts participants to infer essential structure, but hearing neutral or social properties ("women are underpaid") generalized prompts other causal beliefs. Thus, generics induce essentialism only in interaction with cues that reasonably prompt essentialist explanation. We tested our model with adult participants (n = 739 total), using measures that disentangle essentialist beliefs from kind beliefs. In study 1, we replicate prior methods with our new measures, and find that generics influence kind beliefs more than essentialism. In study 2, we vary property content (biological vs. cultural properties), and show that generics only increase essentialism when paired with biological properties. In study 3, we show that generics designate kinds but not essentialism when neutral properties are used across animals, tools, and people. In study 4, we show that believing a category is a kind increases the spontaneous production of generic statements, regardless of whether the kind is essential or socially constructed. Generics do not necessitate essentialist beliefs. Participants were flexible in their reasoning about kinds.

Asymmetric Mixtures: Common Conceptual Priorities for Social and Chemical Kinds.

Hypodescent is the phenomenon of categorizing biracial individuals asymmetrically (e.g., viewing Black-White biracial individuals as Black instead of White). We propose that hypodescent is explained by domain-general attentional biases toward dangerous and distinctive components in conceptual representation. This cognitive mechanism derives its empirical support from several research traditions, especially from research on how people evaluate generic statements. Here, we demonstrate how liquid mixtures are categorized in ways characteristic of hypodescent. Mixtures that contain equal amounts of two liquids are categorized as whichever liquid is more dangerous or distinctive (Study 1). Dangerous and distinctive components are prioritized even when they are less than 50% of the mixture (Study 2). The relative dangerousness or distinctiveness of liquids (Study 3) or racial groups (Study 4) predicts the strength and direction of this asymmetry. We discuss how conceptual prominence relates to previous theories of hypodescent.

The emerging causal understanding of institutional objects.

Institutional objects, such as money, drivers' licenses, and borders, have functions because of their social roles rather than their immediate physical properties. These objects are causally different than standard artifacts (e.g. hammers, chairs, and cars), sharing more commonality with other social roles. Thus, they inform psychological theories of human-made objects as well as children's emerging understanding of social reality. We examined whether children (N=180, ages 4-9) differentiate institutional objects from standard artifacts. Specifically, we examine whether children understand that mutual intentions (i.e., the intentions of a social collective) underlie the functional affordances of institutional objects in ways that they do not for standard artifacts. We find that young children assimilate institutional objects into their intuitive theories of standard artifacts; children begin to differentiate between the domains in the elementary school years.

Mutual intentions as a causal framework for social groups.

Children's early emerging intuitive theories are specialized for different conceptual domains. Recently attention has turned to children's concepts of social groups, finding that children believe that many social groups mark uniquely social information such as allegiances and obligations. But another critical component of intuitive theories, the causal beliefs that underlie category membership, has received less attention. We propose that children believe membership in these groups is constituted by mutual intentions: i.e., all group members (including the individual) intend for an individual to be a member and all group members (including the individual) have common knowledge of these intentions. Children in a broad age range (4-9) applied a mutual-intentional framework to newly encountered social groups early in development (Experiment 1, 2, 4). Further, they deploy this mutual-intentional framework selectively, withholding it from essentialized social categories such as gender (Experiment 3). Mutual intentionality appears to be a vital aspect of children's naïve sociology.

Children Prefer Diverse Samples for Inductive Reasoning in the Social Domain.

Not all samples of evidence are equally conclusive: Diverse evidence is more representative than narrow evidence. Prior research showed that children did not use sample diversity in evidence selection tasks, indiscriminately choosing diverse or narrow sets (tiger-mouse; tiger-lion) to learn about animals. This failure is not due to a general deficit of inductive reasoning, but reflects children's belief about the category and property at test. Five- to 7 year-olds' inductive reasoning (n = 65) was tested in two categories (animal, people) and properties (toy preference, biological property). As stated earlier, children ignored diverse evidence when learning about animals' biological properties. When learning about people's toy preferences, however, children selected the diverse samples, providing the most compelling evidence to date of spontaneous selection of diverse evidence.