Weisman Kara, Johnson Marissa V, Shutts Kristin
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.
Dev Sci. 2015 Nov;18(6):1036-43. doi: 10.1111/desc.12269. Epub 2014 Dec 7.
The present research investigated young children's automatic encoding of two social categories that are highly relevant to adults: gender and race. Three- to 6-year-old participants learned facts about unfamiliar target children who varied in either gender or race and were asked to remember which facts went with which targets. When participants made mistakes, they were more likely to confuse targets of the same gender than targets of different genders, but they were equally likely to confuse targets within and across racial groups. However, a social preference measure indicated that participants were sensitive to both gender and race information. Participants with more racial diversity in their social environments were more likely to encode race, but did not have stronger racial preferences. These findings provide evidence that young children do not automatically encode all perceptible features of others. Further, gender may be a more fundamental social category than race.
性别和种族的自动编码。3至6岁的参与者学习了关于不熟悉的目标儿童的事实，这些儿童在性别或种族上有所不同，并被要求记住哪些事实与哪些目标相关。当参与者犯错时，他们更有可能混淆同性别的目标，而不是不同性别的目标，但他们混淆种族群体内部和跨种族群体目标的可能性是相同的。然而，一项社会偏好测量表明，参与者对性别和种族信息都很敏感。社会环境中种族多样性更多的参与者更有可能对种族进行编码，但没有更强的种族偏好。这些发现提供了证据，表明幼儿不会自动编码他人的所有可感知特征。此外，性别可能是比种族更基本的社会类别。
