Early emerging system for reasoning about the social nature of food

Abstract

Selecting appropriate foods is a complex and evolutionarily ancient problem, yet past studies have revealed little evidence of adaptations present in infancy that support sophisticated reasoning about perceptual properties of food. We propose that humans have an earlyemerging system for reasoning about the social nature of food selection. Specifically, infants' reasoning about food choice is tied to their thinking about agents' intentions and social relationships. Whereas infants do not expect people to like the same objects, infants view food preferences as meaningfully shared across individuals. Infants' reasoning about food preferences is fundamentally social: They generalize food preferences across individuals who affiliate, or who speak a common language, but not across individuals who socially disengage or who speak different languages. Importantly, infants' reasoning about food preferences is flexibly calibrated to their own experiences: Tests of bilingual babies reveal that an infant's sociolinguistic background influences whether she will constrain her generalization of food preferences to people who speak the same language. Additionally, infants' systems for reasoning about food is differentially responsive to positive and negative information. Infants generalize information about food disgust across all people, regardless of those people's social identities. Thus, whereas food preferences are seen as embedded within social groups, disgust is interpreted as socially universal, which could help infants avoid potentially dangerous foods. These studies reveal an early-emerging system for thinking about food that incorporates social reasoning about agents and their relationships, and allows infants to make abstract, flexible, adaptive inferences to interpret others' food choices.food | social cognition | infancy | cognitive development | disgust

The Origins of Social Categorization

“…Spoken language and food preferences vary across groups, and are constrained by sensitive periods for learning ([105–108] Box 4), making them potential candidates for prioritized social categorization. Indeed, infants see shared language and shared foods preferences as providing information about social obligation and inductive generalization [76–77,80]. Critically, language and food preferences may have a special significance–infants do not use highly similar cues, such as object preferences, to make the same kinds of social inferences [80].…”

“…Indeed, infants see shared language and shared foods preferences as providing information about social obligation and inductive generalization [76–77,80]. Critically, language and food preferences may have a special significance–infants do not use highly similar cues, such as object preferences, to make the same kinds of social inferences [80]. This account would make the further predictions (not yet tested) that infants’ social inferences would be guided by other fundamental markers of social group membership, such as kinship, or knowledge of group rituals, but not by arbitrary dimensions of similarity that did not mark social group across human evolutionary history.…”

“…In fact, infants use language for more than personal decisions about whom to like or whom to learn from; they create conceptually rich social categories based on language, whereby they use language to make predictions about people’s likely traits and social interactions For example, they expect same-language speakers to be more likely to affiliate [77], and expect same-language speakers to share important social similarities, even when the language shared by the speakers is unfamiliar to them [80]. …”

“…If so, which experiences mitigate these biases? In our research, infants raised in bilingual environments generalized information even across different-language speakers [80], suggesting multilingual exposure may cause people to be less likely to see language as marking concrete social boundaries. More work is needed to determine whether experiencing a diverse linguistic community could reduce stereotyping and prejudice, and, if so, whether the reduction in bias would be specifically in the domain of language (e.g., by increasing attitudes towards foreign speakers), or would be broader.…”

Reply to Kinzler and Liberman: Neural correlate provides direct evidence that infant's social preferences are about information

“…This categorization could support additional inferences, such as generalizing properties across members of groups, as might be the case when infants observe third-party interactions (6). These findings suggest that infants' reasoning about social categories may involve processes other than understanding language as a means of information transfer between individuals.…”