Building Social Categories

One line of the lab's work asks how children come to divide the social world into meaningful groups. We explore how, beginning in infancy, children use cues like language to mark social category membership, and how this reasoning broadens across childhood to include categories such as nationality, immigration status, race, and religion. Central questions include how children use group membership to make predictions about others—for example, to anticipate what someone will eat or whether they will follow social norms—and how growing up in a multilingual or otherwise diverse environment shapes the categories children form and the inferences they draw.