Final answer:
Children first accurately differentiate between social categories based on gender, with gender identity being more significant than racial identity among young children.
Step-by-step explanation:
The question involves understanding at what stage children first accurately differentiate between social categories.
Research on children's category awareness indicates that children first accurately differentiate between social categories by gender rather than racial or ethnic groups.
Specifically, according to research by Rogers and Meltzoff (2017), gender identity plays a more crucial role in the self-identity of young children than race, even among diverse children with an average age of about 10 years.
Children's ability to distinguish between different social categories such as race, gender, and age is an important aspect of their cognitive and social development, and these distinctions are influenced by societal values, beliefs, and attitudes.
Despite the three-factor test used in America to categorize people based on skin pigmentation, hair texture, and eye shape, which tends to generate categories such as White, Black, and Asian, children's understanding and identification with these categories are found to be more nuanced and less rigid.