The Origins of Social Categorization

Forming conceptually-rich social categories helps people to navigate the complex social world by allowing them to reason about the likely thoughts, beliefs, actions, and interactions of others, as guided by group membership. Nevertheless, social categorization often has nefarious consequences. We suggest that the foundation of the human ability to form useful social categories is in place in infancy: social categories guide the inferences infants make about the shared characteristics and social relationships of other people. We also suggest that the ability to form abstract social categories may be separable from the eventual negative downstream consequences of social categorization, including prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping. Although a tendency to form inductively-rich social categories appears early in ontogeny, prejudice based on each particular category dimension may not be inevitable.