Children infer social group attitudes from evaluative behavioral information but do not extend them to unfamiliar group members

Children readily infer the presence of social groups based on shared characteristics. Theorizing and research in developmental psychology suggest that social categorization and inference processes may be influenced by linguistic cues or labels used to describe behaviors or groups. For example, Gelman and Heyman (1999) found that children attributed greater stability to behaviors if described with nouns rather than verbs. However, there is only limited developmental research on how linguistic cues affect group attitude formation. We present three studies examining how linguistics cues influence evaluation of novel groups, focusing on the distinction between noun and adjective labels. We introduced children to two groups via a storybook paradigm depicting desirable or undesirable behaviors (N = 365; median age = 7 years). While children acquired evaluative group representations, contrary to our hypotheses, linguistic variations did not significantly impact attitude formation. Children expressed group differences primarily through positive evaluations and did not generalize these group evaluations to unfamiliar group members, instead tending to evaluate them mildly positively.