In their target article, Cimpian & Salomon (C&S) posit that people tend to explain patterns they observe based on features that are inherent in those patterns' constituents, and demonstrate how such an inherence heuristic may be the first step in a causal chain that leads to a variety of biases, beliefs, and attitudes observed across the field of psychology. Whereas the target article connects the inherence heuristic to many areas, we address its connection to our own area of expertise – social groups – focusing in particular on C&S's discussion of system justification (Jost & Banaji Reference Jost and Banaji1994). According to C&S, the inherence heuristic provides the cognitive underpinnings for, or enables, system-justifying patterns of thinking. As such, C&S note, the inherence heuristic should emerge early in childhood, and many of the cognitions resulting from the inherence heuristic by their very nature serve to perpetuate the system. Other aspects of system justification – for example its palliative (e.g., reassuring) functions – may emerge only later in development. Recent data from our lab, focusing on young children's racial attitudes, are consistent with C&S's account of early-emerging system-justifying tendencies. Here, we review our research and suggest alternative explanations for our findings, proposing that the inherence heuristic may in fact not be needed to understand system-justifying tendencies among children.

In our work, we have sought to understand how groups' relative status shapes children's race-based attitudes measured at the implicit (i.e., automatic or unconscious) level. Consistent with the inherence heuristic account, we predicted that children would be sensitive not only to the existence but more specifically to the extent of status differences among racial groups in their society. Focusing first on the American cultural context, we found that although White American children aged 7–11 years showed a robust implicit preference for Whites over Blacks, Black American children on average showed a lack of implicit bias (appearing, on average, to prefer neither Blacks nor Whites; Newheiser & Olson Reference Newheiser and Olson2012) – directly paralleling prior findings with American adults (e.g., Nosek et al. Reference Nosek, Banaji and Greenwald2002). This pattern is remarkable, albeit unfortunate, insofar as it suggests that minority-group children as young as age 7 years are influenced by the low status that society attributes to their racial in-group. Furthermore, we have conceptually replicated and extended this finding cross-culturally: Turning to South Africa, a society in which race-based differentials in status and advantage are extremely pronounced – much more so than in the United States – we found that 6- to 11-year-old Black and Coloured (i.e., multiracial) South African children implicitly favored Whites, the highest-status racial group in their society, over their own in-groups (Newheiser et al. Reference Newheiser, Dunham, Merrill, Hoosain and Olson2014). Both Black and Coloured children also implicitly preferred Coloureds, an intermediate-status group, over Blacks, representing an out-group preference among Black South African children (Dunham et al. Reference Dunham, Newheiser, Hoosain, Merrill and Olson2014). Thus, whereas race-based status differentials canceled out implicit in-group preference among Black American children, they resulted in a full reversal to out-group-favoring implicit biases among South African minority-group children.

Our findings align with the inherence heuristic account insofar as they demonstrate that system-justifying cognition that tracks the degree of group-based status differences can indeed be observed among children. In terms of C&S's account, our findings might be interpreted as suggesting that as children observe a pattern indicating that members of certain racial/ethnic groups appear to be more advantaged than members of other groups, children come to infer that this pattern occurs because members of advantaged racial/ethnic groups possess characteristics that make them inherently “better” – that is, that certain racial/ethnic groups should have higher status by virtue of their inherent features (see also Kay et al. Reference Kay, Gaucher, Peach, Laurin, Friesen, Zanna and Spencer2009).

Whereas our data are potentially consistent with C&S's general argument, we note that the specifics of the inherence heuristic account remain in need of direct evidence. In particular, we question whether children are in fact making inferences regarding the inherent features of racial/ethnic groups that differ in status. An alternative, and simpler, account relies on mere cognitive associations that may emerge as children observe the world around them. That is, as children encounter members of different racial/ethnic groups, in their everyday lives or via the media, they likely notice the covariation between race/ethnicity and status (e.g., in terms of wealth; Olson et al. Reference Olson, Shutts, Kinzler and Weisman2012). Forming such associations between racial groups and status might directly result in the lack of implicit race bias we observed among Black American children, and in the implicit out-group biases we observed among South African minority-group children; an inference regarding inherent features may not be necessary at all.

To conclude, the inherence heuristic account argues that people tend to interpret patterns they observe in terms of inherent features, and that this tendency enables system-justifying cognition (among other psychological phenomena). However, we propose that merely observing relationships between group membership and a valenced characteristic (e.g., status) will result in preferences and beliefs that are consistent with those relationships. For example, observing that Group A is low in status may lead one to disfavor Group A simply because status is a highly valued characteristic; an additional inference that something inherent about Group A makes it low in status is not necessary. Moreover, even if one does eventually make such an inference about inherent features, this inference is plausibly a consequence rather than a cause of system-justifying beliefs and preferences – perhaps serving to justify such beliefs and preferences. It thus seems neither necessary nor sufficient to posit the inherence heuristic as a precursor to system-justifying or hierarchy-attenuating beliefs and preferences. We note that developmental research is in a unique position to help pit these alternative accounts against each other by providing evidence of the sequence in which these, and other related, processes first emerge.