Social cognitive development: The intergroup context

Throughout human history and across all human cultures, civilizations have organized themselves into social collectives, to the extent that it seems fair to say that social groups are the natural ecology of our species. In many ways, these groups play the same role as do categories in other domains; after all, the world is an incredibly complex place, and dividing it into categories is a powerful way to simplify this complexity and maximize efficiency in learning. In the social world, this way of working through complexity is especially important, given the extreme range of variability that exists across human individuals and communities. Children must navigate a world full of people with a range of properties that appear to have little in common with one another, posing a particularly difficult learnability problem. Social categorization allows children to work through this complexity by selecting features that denote meaningful differences between people. As a result, social categories become a fundamental lens through which we see the world.It should thus not surprise that social categorization of some sort exists across all human societies, making it a human universal (Brown, 2004). But, there are important differences across human cultures in how groups are defined, which groups are viewed as important, and what the consequences of group membership are. Thus, it is important to consider how cognitive development unfolds in an intergroup context. In this chapter, we broadly explore how children across development understand social categories and use these categories to navigate the social world. In doing so, we aim to demonstrate where there is diversity across human cultures in how social categorization unfolds, and what aspects of this diversity are grounded in common psychological tendencies and mechanisms.