Please join us on TUESDAY (9/28) for our next Developmental Science Seminar featuring Dr. Ashley Jordan, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University in the Human Diversity Lab. All are welcome!

Date: Tuesday, September 28th
Time: 1:00-2:00 pm
Location: Tobin 521b OR via Zoom (Meeting: 916 8523 2011, Email Jen McDermott <jmm@umass.edu> for passcode)

The Emergent Social Significance of Similarity

A central theme in the developmental literature on social cognition is children’s group-mindedness. Many studies have demonstrated that categorical information drives children’s first-person social evaluations and third-person social inferences. Thus, researchers in this area have typically argued that categorical information, such as group labels, are privileged in children’s social reasoning; however, only a fraction of the messages that children encounter highlight discrete categories. Messages about similarity have received comparatively less empirical attention. In Part 1 of this talk, I will present a set of studies assessing the developmental origins of appearance-based homophily. I will show that preschool-age children base their preferences for play partners on adults’ messages about shared physical appearance, and they come to do so spontaneously as they mature. In part 2, I will present a series of studies demonstrating that children use interpersonal similarities, like shared preferences, to reason about the quality and coalitional structure of others’ relationships. Based on these findings, I will argue that similarities are an integral part of children’s social reasoning.