Social group membership and its impact on children's learning processes across two cultures

Children often rely on the testimony of their caregivers and other adults when learning about the world; nevertheless, they are remarkably selective in choosing whom to trust for information. Specifically, children learn to associate informants with particular traits (e.g., trustworthiness) through experience, and attend preferentially to people they consider credible sources of information. One possible influence on children's decisions is the social groups to which they belong. Children are aware of social group differences at a young age, and are inclined to align their opinions with the members of their social groups. It is therefore plausible that the social groups to which informants belong are an important consideration for children. Moreover, much of the work on children's learning decisions and on children's sensitivity to social group differences has been conducted with European American children. In the following thesis, I examined whether the potential impact of social group membership on children's learning processes is present across different cultures. This thesis encompasses three experimental studies. Study I investigated whether young children of a different culture (i.e., Taiwanese) could recognize and categorize social groups as easily as their European American peers, and whether they are similarly inclined to regard members of their own social group (i.e., their ingroup) more positively than members of social outgroups. Study 2 investigated whether European American and Taiwanese children's understanding of social group membership, once established, impacted their learning preferences with unfamiliar ingroup and outgroup informants. Study 3 investigated whether social group memberships impacted both European American and Taiwanese children's abilities to infer and retain trait information regarding unfamiliar individuals. Through these three studies, I aimed to gain a greater understanding of how social group membership impacts children's learning processes across two different cultures.