The Influence Of Social Categorization Cues On Children’s Social Behavior Reasoning

As an important basis for dividing social categories,social categorization clues are key factor affecting children’s social behavior inference.Social categorization clues can be divided into natural clues and social clues based on whether they have physiological characteristics.In the study of natural categories and artificial objects,it was found that children are more inclined to classify and reason by using natural clues.However,in social behavior activities,there are still controversy based on natural clues or social clues.Therefore,the study used a cross-sectional design to examine age trends in social categorization cues and their effects on children’s social behavior reasoning and stability between the ages of 5 and 10.Experiment 1 examined the development trends in the age of children’s social categorization cues use when both naturalistic cues(gender cues)and social cues(shared preference cues)were present.197 children aged 5-10 years were selected to complete the social categorization task.The results revealed that there were age differences in the use of gender cues and common motor preference cues in children’s social categorization use.5-year-olds scored significantly higher on the categorization than 9-year-olds and 10-year-olds,indicating that 5-year-olds were more inclined to use gender cues for categorization than 9-year-olds and 10-year-olds.8-year-old children began to prefer social cues for categorization.Experiment 2 examined whether there were differences in social behavior reasoning and behavior stability when the elderly children used two kinds of social cues,common movement preference cue and category label cue.In experiment 2a,154 children aged 7-10 years old were selected to complete the reasoning task,and the subjects were asked to choose which cues to use for social behavior reasoning(prosocial behavior task,aggressive behavior task)using the ternary classification task.The results showed that children’s scores of common preference cues were significantly higher than those of category label cues in verbal aggression tasks,behavioral aggression tasks and friendship tasks.There was no significant difference between the two social cues in cooperative tasks.Experiment 2b uses the research paradigm of peer relationship stability to further investigate whether different social categorization clues have an impact on social behavior stability.The results showed that the stability score of peer relationship in the group of common movement preference cue was significantly higher than that in the group of category label cue.Conclusion:(1)Children aged 5-6 are more inclined to use gender clues for categorization,and children aged 9-10 are more flexible in using social categorization clues.Children’s use of social categorization clues shows a trend of development from natural clues to social clues.(2)In social behavior reasoning task,children tend to use common movement preference cues in language attack task,behavior attack task and friendship behavior task,but there is no difference between the two cues in the choice of cooperative task.(3)In the peer relationship stability task,the social behavior stability formed by children using common movement preference cues was higher than that of category label cues.