InsideOut_Zoom

While humans on the one hand avoid harming others (Crockett et al., 2014, Cushman et al., 2012) and instead prefer to help them (Tomasello, 2009), recent history bears witness to numerous horrific crimes. The dehumanization hypothesis seeks to explain this paradox, stating that the targets of violence and cruelty are ascribed fewer human characteristics than members of the perpetrators’ in-group (Andrighetto et al., 2014). Current research suggests that dehumanization of out-group members occurs in children as young as 6 years old (McLoughlin et al., 2018). Still unclear, however, is when and how dehumanization processes manifest during development. We want to shed light on this and investigate whether the dehumanization process emerges alongside the ability to distinguish between in-group and out-group members, as well as the tendency to prefer in-group over out-group members (e.g., Begus et al., 2016, Kinzler et al., 2007, Xiao, 2017). Capitalizing on past work suggestive that infants distinguish between animate agents and inanimate objects, and infer that agentive actions, but not the actions of inanimate objects, are driven by underlying mental states (Adam, Reitenbach, & Elsner, 2017; Woodward, 1998; Woodward, Sommerville, & Guarjardo, 2001), we predict that if infants selectively dehumanize out-group members, they would ascribe out-group members less agency and therefore be less likely to attribute stable goals to them. Following Buttleman and colleagues (2007), we define in-group and out-group conditions based on linguistic cues. Our participants will consist of English-learning infants, and thus the English speaking agents will serve as the in-group while Spanish speaking agents will serve as the out-group. To investigate our question, we adopt the paradigm by Woodward et al. (1998). The study consists of four phases:(i) the introduction phase, where two female experimenters will introduce themselves, one in English and one in Spanish; (ii) the habituation phase, in which infants observe one of the experimenters (the English speaker in the In-group condition, and the Spanish speaker in the Out-group condition; critically this will be the same bilingual actor across conditions) reach for one of two toys; (iii) the toys switch places, in which the two toys switch places; and (iv) the test phase, in which the human experimenter again reaches for either the same toy as during the habituation phase, now in a different location (same-goal trial), or the other toy (same-path trial). In past research (e.g., Woodward et al., 1998), infants expect human experimenters, who are perceived as animate, goal-driven agents, to grasp the same toy as during habituation, but do not expect inanimate objects to do so. Building on these findings, we expect the same pattern in our study, whereby infants would readily attribute goals to the in-group agent and would therefore be surprised if they reached for a different toy during the test phase. Conversely, infants would not be surprised if the out-group agent reached for another toy during the test phase.

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