Diesendruck Gil, Deblinger-Tangi Ronit
Bar-Ilan University.
Child Dev. 2014 Jan-Feb;85(1):114-23. doi: 10.1111/cdev.12130. Epub 2013 May 27.
Kindergarteners treat certain social categories as natural kinds. This study addressed how children pick out social categories. Ninety-one 19- and 26-month-olds were familiarized to exemplars of categories of people (e.g., Blacks-Whites, men-women) and animals (e.g., cows-horses). Participants then saw a picture matching the familiarization category and another that did not, and were asked to select which was like the familiarization pictures. For half of the participants, a label was attached to familiarization exemplars, while for the other half, no label was mentioned. The main finding was that for the younger toddlers, labels significantly improved recognition of the categories of people, but not of animals. These results are taken to support the notion that social categories are indeed culturally constructed.
幼儿园儿童将某些社会类别视为自然种类。本研究探讨了儿童如何识别社会类别。91名19个月和26个月大的儿童被介绍了不同类别的人（如黑人 - 白人、男性 - 女性）和动物（如奶牛 - 马）的示例。参与者随后看到一张与介绍类别匹配的图片和另一张不匹配的图片，并被要求选择哪一张与介绍图片相似。对于一半的参与者，介绍示例附有标签，而对于另一半参与者，则未提及标签。主要发现是，对于较小的幼儿，标签显著提高了对人类类别的识别，但对动物类别则没有。这些结果被用来支持社会类别确实是文化建构的这一观点。
