Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Dev Sci. 2018 May;21(3):e12586. doi: 10.1111/desc.12586. Epub 2017 Jul 13.
Previous research has suggested that infants exhibit a preference for familiar over unfamiliar social groups (e.g., preferring individuals from their own language group over individuals from a foreign language group). However, because past studies often employ forced-choice procedures, it is not clear whether infants' intergroup preferences are driven by positivity toward members of familiar groups, negativity toward members of unfamiliar groups, or both. Across six experiments, we implemented a habituation procedure to independently measure infants' positive and negative evaluations of speakers of familiar and unfamiliar languages. We report that by 1 year of age, infants positively evaluate individuals who speak a familiar language, but do not negatively evaluate individuals who speak an unfamiliar language (Experiments 1 and 2). Several experiments rule out lower-level explanations (Experiments 3-6). Together these data suggest that children's early social group preferences may be shaped by positive evaluations of familiar group(s), rather than negative evaluations of unfamiliar groups.
先前的研究表明，婴儿表现出对熟悉的社会群体比对不熟悉的社会群体的偏好（例如，更喜欢来自自己语言群体的个体，而不是来自外语群体的个体）。然而，由于过去的研究经常采用强制选择程序，因此不清楚婴儿的群体间偏好是由对熟悉群体成员的积极性、对不熟悉群体成员的消极性还是两者共同驱动的。在六项实验中，我们采用了习惯化程序来分别测量婴儿对熟悉和不熟悉语言的说话者的积极和消极评价。我们报告说，在 1 岁时，婴儿对说熟悉语言的个体表现出积极评价，但对说不熟悉语言的个体没有表现出消极评价（实验 1 和实验 2）。几个实验排除了较低层次的解释（实验 3-6）。这些数据共同表明，儿童早期的社会群体偏好可能是由对熟悉群体的积极评价而不是对不熟悉群体的消极评价所塑造的。
