The role of cognitive abilities in children's inferences about social atypicality and peer exclusion and inclusion in intergroup contexts

Children aged 6-7 years judged a loyal and a partially disloyal member of a school in terms of how typical they are within the school group and their likely acceptance by peers from the same school and a different school. Second-order mental-state understanding (SOMSU) predicted whether children thought atypical members would be included differently in the two groups. Counterfactual reasoning ability, multiple classification ability, and working memory ability did not predict children's judgements of group members. Moreover, as predicted by the developmental subjective group dynamics model, only children with higher levels of SOMSU and who discerned differences in the typicality of normative and deviant ingroup members inferred that peers would differently include atypical individuals from the same and different groups.