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Developmental Sources of Social Divisions 1

Background My research has aimed for more than 30 years to shed light on human knowledge through study of its origins and development. That study has focused on the fundamental capacities of human infants and young children to reason and learn about the material world of objects, the abstract concepts at the foundations of science and mathematics, and the social world of people. The primary goal of this research, like that of the present workshop, is to shed light on human nature. I believe that we can learn a great deal about our mature selves by contemplating young developing minds, especially in the context of broader studies of human evolution (through systematic comparisons across species) and variability (through systematic comparisons of people living in different cultures and circumstances). To introduce my turn to the question of prejudice, I begin by outlining what I believe we have learned from infants about human nature. First, infants understand some things but not others. For example, young infants represent objects and expect them to persist and move on contact, but they have no consistent expectations about the behavior of shadows or sand piles. Infants’ understanding has been revealed most clearly in five domains: They make coherent, interconnected sets of inferences about inanimate objects and their motions, animate agents and their goal-directed actions, numbers and their relations of ordering and arithmetic, places in the navigable terrain, and geometrical forms and their relations of congruence and scaling (Spelke & Kinzler, 2007; Spelke, 2011). Of course, infants’ grasp of each of these entities is highly limited, compared to that of older children and adults. For example, infants represent numbers approximately but not exactly (e.g., Izard, Sann, Spelke & Streri, 2009), and they determine their own spatial position by recording the distances and directions of surrounding surfaces but not the lengths of those surfaces or the angles they form (Lee, Sovrano & Spelke, 2012). Interestingly, young infants’ knowledge