Most countries in the world are composed of people who vary in numerous social dimensions: race, religion, ethnicity, social status, language, and more. Amidst this diversity, people often identify social groups, and develop their own group identities. One of the areas of research we investigate in the lab is how concepts of social groups develop, what shapes these concepts, and what are the implications of holding these concepts.

To address these questions we conduct behavioral experiments with a range of ages: from infants to middle-childhood. Infants are typically brought to the lab and are studied with eye-tracking technology. Among our questions regarding infants, we ask: What are the basic social categorization capacities present in infancy? What motivates their discrimination of people into social categories? How do they construe people who are similar to them ("in-group") and those who are different ("out-group")?

Studies with children are typically conducted in their educational settings: preschools, kindergartens, and schools. Questions there have to do with the nature of children's social group concepts. For instance, do children hold essentialist beliefs about social groups? If so, why, in what respects, and regarding which social categories? Do they hold essentialist beliefs equally regarding their in-group and out-group?

A final set of related questions is how do children from different cultural backgrounds (e.g., religious Jews, Muslim Arabs, Christian Arabs) and social status (e.g., majority vs. minority) construe social groups, and how their construal relates to motivational factors (e.g., feelings regarding their social identity).

For some of our recent studies in this field, check out these papers:

Diesendruck, G. (2021). A motivational perspective on the development of social essentialism. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 30(1), 76-81.

Essa, F., Rakoczy, H., & Diesendruck, G. (2025). Exploring the out‐group homogeneity effect among Arab children in Israel: The roles of religion, contact, and group identification. Child Development.

Fogiel, A. Z., Hermes, J., Rakoczy, H., & Diesendruck, G. (2023). Infants' biased individuation of in-group members. Cognition, 239, 105561.