Children’s use of categories and mental states to predict social behavior.

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Date
2014-10Author
Chalik, Lisa
Rivera, Cyrielle
Rhodes, Marjorie
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Integrating generic information about categories with knowledge of specific individuals is a
critical component of successful inductive inferences. The present study tested whether
children’s approach to this task systematically shifts as they develop causal understandings of the
mechanisms that shape individual action. 3- and 4-year-old children (N = 65) predicted harmful
behaviors in scenarios that pitted category-based expectations—that individuals will harm
members of opposing social categories—against expectations about agents’
mental states—that
individuals will harm people they are mad at. As children developed more advanced theories of
mind, they became more likely to predict the agent’s behavior based on individual mental states
instead of category memberships. Thus, as children develop causal understandings of the
mechanisms that shape individual behavior, they are more likely to override generic category
information to base inferences on the relevant features of specific individuals.
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Scholarly article
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0037729http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0037729.supp
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12202/4427
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