What Is a Group? Young Children’s Perceptions of Different Types of Groups and Group Entitativity

PLOS ONE, Dec 2019

To date, developmental research on groups has focused mainly on in-group biases and intergroup relations. However, little is known about children’s general understanding of social groups and their perceptions of different forms of group. In this study, 5- to 6-year-old children were asked to evaluate prototypes of four key types of groups: an intimacy group (friends), a task group (people who are collaborating), a social category (people who look alike), and a loose association (people who coincidently meet at a tram stop). In line with previous work with adults, the vast majority of children perceived the intimacy group, task group, and social category, but not the loose association, to possess entitativity, that is, to be a ‘real group.’ In addition, children evaluated group member properties, social relations, and social obligations differently in each type of group, demonstrating that young children are able to distinguish between different types of in-group relations. The origins of the general group typology used by adults thus appear early in development. These findings contribute to our knowledge about children's intuitive understanding of groups and group members' behavior.

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What Is a Group? Young Children’s Perceptions of Different Types of Groups and Group Entitativity

March What Is a Group? Young Children's Perceptions of Different Types of Groups and Group Entitativity Maria Plötner 0 1 Harriet Over 1 Malinda Carpenter 0 1 Michael Tomasello 0 1 0 Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology , Leipzig, Germany , 2 University of York, York, United Kingdom, 3 University of St Andrews , St Andrews , United Kingdom 1 Editor: Tobias Preis, University of Warwick , UNITED KINGDOM To date, developmental research on groups has focused mainly on in-group biases and intergroup relations. However, little is known about children's general understanding of social groups and their perceptions of different forms of group. In this study, 5- to 6-year-old children were asked to evaluate prototypes of four key types of groups: an intimacy group (friends), a task group (people who are collaborating), a social category (people who look alike), and a loose association (people who coincidently meet at a tram stop). In line with previous work with adults, the vast majority of children perceived the intimacy group, task group, and social category, but not the loose association, to possess entitativity, that is, to be a 'real group.' In addition, children evaluated group member properties, social relations, and social obligations differently in each type of group, demonstrating that young children are able to distinguish between different types of in-group relations. The origins of the general group typology used by adults thus appear early in development. These findings contribute to our knowledge about children's intuitive understanding of groups and group members' behavior. - OPEN ACCESS Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Young children grow up in a complex social world in which they are constantly flooded with social information. Our social world is composed not only of individuals but of an array of different relationships and social groupings. One challenge for children is to decipher which of these social groupings are meaningful. People can appear to be a group from the outside, for example simply because they are in close proximity to each other, but they can be connected with each other at different levels: they can be kin or friends, be on the same sports or work team, be part of the same national or language group, or they can be associated with each other only briefly and loosely when, for instance, they take the same bus to get to the airport, or line up at a counter at the same time. Determining the type of group to which an association of people belongs is not only crucial for being able to understand individual group members’ behavior but can also be a short-cut to predicting how group members will relate to each other. For example, one can expect kin or friends to be loyal to each other, but one might not expect this about people who happen to be lining up at a counter at the same time. Another important form of predictions that can be drawn from social groupings, but which has been understudied in previous research (see also [ 1 ]), regards the grouping as a whole. For example, a friendship is supposed to be a longer-lasting, more coherent entity than a gathering in front of a counter. When it comes to the perception of social groupings, Lickel and colleagues [ 2 ] have argued that adults apply a folk typology, in which they intuitively distinguish between four qualitatively different types of groups. In support of this idea, Lickel at el. [ 3 ] investigated how adult participants sorted 40 examples of real-life groups, and how they rated each of these groups on a set of eight group characteristics such as shared goals, similarity of group members, interaction among group members, and group size. They found that participants distinguished four basic types of groups: intimacy groups (such as families and friends), task groups (such as work or sports teams), social categories (such as women or U.S. citizens), and loose associations (such as people waiting in line at a counter). Participants associated different group characteristics with each group type, for example a long duration and high levels of interaction for intimacy groups, common goals and interaction in task groups, large size and member similarity for social categories, and short duration and low levels of similarity and common goals for loose associations (for an overview, see [ 2 ]). Related research has shown that adults treat some social groupings as entities [ 4–6 ]. The extent to which a group appears to be a coherent entity and therefore possesses a quality of “groupness” has been referred to as “entitativity” [ 2–5, 7 ]. Lickel and colleagues showed that the four types of groups were perceived by adults to have different levels of entitativity, with the highest level f (...truncated)


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Maria Plötner, Harriet Over, Malinda Carpenter, Michael Tomasello. What Is a Group? Young Children’s Perceptions of Different Types of Groups and Group Entitativity, PLOS ONE, 2016, Volume 11, Issue 3, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0152001