Navigating the Social World ─ What Infants, Children, and Other Species Can Teach Us

Navigating the social world requires sophisticated cognitive machinery that, although present quite early in crude forms, undergoes significant change across the lifespan. This book will be the first to report on evidence that has accumulated on an unprecedented scale, showing us what capacities for social cognition are present at birth and early in life, and how these capacities develop through learning in the first years of life. The volume will highlight what is known about the discoveries themselves but also what these discoveries imply about the nature of early social cognition and the methods that have allowed these discoveries -- what is known concerning the phylogeny and ontogeny of social cognition. To capture the full depth and breadth of the exciting work that is blossoming on this topic in a manner that is accessible and engaging, the editors invited 70 leading researchers to develop a short report of their work that would be written for a broad audience. The purpose of this format was for each piece to focus on a single core message: are babies aware of what is right and wrong, why do children have the same implicit intergroup preferences that adults do, what does language do to the building of category knowledge, and so on. The unique format and accessible writing style will be appealing to graduate students and researchers in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and social psychology.

Mahzarin R. Banaji is Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Banaji studies the social beliefs and preferences of adults and children with a focus on implicit or automatic cognition. She taught at Yale University for 15 years, receiving the Lex Hixon Prize for Teaching Excellence and served as the first Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. At present, Banaji also serves as Cowan Chair in Human Social Dynamics at the Santa Fe Institute. Banaji is the recipient of a J. S. Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Diener Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology. She was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the American Academy for Arts and Science and Herbert Simon Fellow of the Association for Social and Political Psychology. Her work has been recognized with a Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association and she served as President of the Association for Psychological Science. Banaji has published over 180 scholarly papers and most recently a book (with Anthony Greenwald), Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.

Susan A. Gelman teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is the Heinz Werner Collegiate Professor of Psychology. Gelman's research focuses on concept and language development in young children. She is the author of over 200 scholarly publications, including The Essential Child (Oxford University Press, 2003), which received the Cognitive Development Society Book Award and the Eleanor Maccoby Book Prize from the American Psychological Association. Gelman is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association (Division 7), and the Cognitive Science Society. She has received numerous awards, including a J. S. Guggenheim Fellowship, a James McKeen Cattell Fund sabbatical fellowship, the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in the Developmental Area, and the Developmental Psychology Mentor Award of Division 7, American Psychological Association. Gelman was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.