The Formation And Development Of Children's Concept Of Group:

Group identity is very essential for individuals.Others' group identity determines the attitudes and behaviors of individuals whom they interact with,and the group identity of individuals also determines the behaviors of themselves.In social psychology,"group"is defined as a collection of three or more individuals,while members of a social group often possess psychological and social connections.Considering the importance of group identity,there intriguing an interesting question about how this concept be developed?This research tries to solve this problem by exploring the development of children's understanding of "group".After summarizing the existing research on children's group perception,the researcher found that few studies have investigated the development of group concepts from the perspective of group characteristics.Although some researchers have tried to classify group clues into two types,few studies have tested them empirically.Therefore,base on previous theoretical frameworks,this research transfer the concept of group into two types of clues:external and internal clues.This research adopted social classification paradigms with the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to conduct the empirical study on the development of children's group concept.This research involving two studies.Study 1 used a traditional social classification research paradigm(Experiment 1A),as well as a new paradigm developed from the traditional one(Experiment 1B).These two experiments jointly explored the development pattern of classification clues for children aged 3-8 years.Experiment 1A recruited a total of 217 children(114 boys)graded from junior kindergarten to grade two of primary school,using the Triad Classification Task.Experiment 1B recruited 212 children(also graded from junior kindergarten to primary,111 boys included)for the individual exclusion task.Both experiments compared children's classification bias for internal clues between different age groups(3-4 vs.5-6 vs.7-8).This study found that three-year-old children have already shown a certain degree of classification bias for internal clues on both experiment tasks,and their classification bias for internal clues have gradually increased with age.However,this bias for internal clues was not consistent,it would variate depending on the contexts.Based on Study 1,Study 2 explored the group perception and its development pattern within 3-6-year-old kindergarten children.A total of 41 valid participants(17 boys)were recruited.This study adopted the sorting card paradigm.The dependent variables included the number of clues children used in the sorting task as well as children's behavior patterns and their reasons for the way that cards were sorted.The results showed that the number of children's group classifications gradually increased with the growing age of children.As the age grew,children have a better understanding of multiple group identities,and they could change the way of classification by the context or researcher's requirements,which showed the sign of children's flexible cognition.Besides,children's descriptions about groups also changed from external-clues-focused to abstract-concepts-focused,reflecting the nascent form of abstract thinking.The findings of this research together with previous researches indicated the characteristic of "internal priority" in children's understanding of group concept.It also illustrated the development pattern of children's group concept grew from external-focused to internal-focused.At the theoretical level,the results of this research directly examined the previous theory of children's intuitive classification systems,suggested that children tend to classify groups according to both external and internal characteristics.Future research could expand the age of participants throughout infant to adult and developed a more comprehensive theory in the development of children's understanding of group.