Having categories for things like “apple,” “dog,” and “ball” means that we can group things that are alike, helping us easily store new information, and helping us to make quick inferences about things we’ve never seen before.
Imagine for a second that we didn’t have the ability to form categories; it would mean that every time we encountered a brand-new object, we’d have to learn about it from scratch. The fact that we have categories means that whenever we encounter a new apple, we don’t have to learn about it; we can just apply what we know about other apples and safely assume that this new apple is a piece of fruit that tastes sweet and is healthy. Just like whenever we encounter a new dog, we’d know something about the way it likely behaves, what it eats, and whether it’s safe to approach.
Categorization begins to develop in the first few months of life. For example, by 3 to 4 months of age, infants can form distinct categories for dogs and cats.
It’s a good thing that infants can do this so quickly, because again, the ability to form categories is a powerful way for us to store information and make predictions about new things.
However, categorization, despite its benefits, also has some downsides. It can sometimes extend beyond the categorization of objects to the categorization of people.
This might sound useful in some cases; for example, knowing that “3-year-olds” generally consist of tiny humans that are prone to throwing insane temper tantrums might help you steer clear of anyone who fits that cute but high-maintenance category. However, this kind of category, often called social categories, can also have negative consequences.
Indeed, if you were to form categories for groups of people, you could easily make a false assumption about someone new just purely based on their category membership. In fact, this behavior is the very definition of “prejudice,” which is the tendency to make assumptions about someone purely based on their membership in a particular group. On top of that, when people tend to place themselves in a group, or what we might call an “ingroup,” there will inevitably be others who are left out of that group—people we call “outgroup” members.
Even infants can make distinctions between ingroup and outgroup members early in life purely because they prefer things that are most familiar to them. For example, although newborns don’t show any preferences for faces based on race, 3-month-old infants prefer images of adults of their own race over images of adults of other races (Kelly, Quinn, Slater, Lee, et al., 2005).
Similarly, 5- and 6-month-old infants prefer to look at people who speak their native language, and 10-month-old infants are even more willing to take toys from people who speak their native language compared to people who speak a foreign language (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007)
This doesn’t mean that all infants will grow into children and adults who will categorize people based on their race, but it does mean infants start to treat people who they don’t often have contact with as different from an early age. But frequent exposure to other races on a daily basis can erase these effects. For example, if children live in neighborhoods where they are often exposed to people of other races, they are better at differentiating between faces of people from other races than children who don’t have the same exposure (Bar-Haim et al., 2006). The same is true for infants who have exposure to people who speak different languages and have different types of accents.
The take-home message is that forming categories is essential for our everyday lives. But the same tendency that allows us to sort objects into boxes can also cause us to put people into boxes, which has some obvious downsides. To fight our natural tendency to want to categorize, it’s important to remember that while categorizing objects is incredibly useful, it is often more useful to think of people as individuals, even if they do belong to religious groups, social groups, or even cultural groups. And exposing infants to lots of different kinds of individuals may help them see people as just that.
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