Seeing isn't believing: the effect of intergroup exposure on children's essentialist beliefs about ethnic categories

Adults and children seem to essentialize certain social categories. Three studies investigated whether, and how, exposure to ethnic diversity affects this bias. Participants were 516 kindergarten, 2nd grade, and 6th grade Israeli Jewish and Arab children attending regular (mono-cultural) or integrated schools. Study 1 revealed that exposure increased the salience of ethnicity, especially for Jewish children. Study 2 showed no differences among groups at kindergarten regarding the relevance of recalling a story character's ethnicity, but by 2nd grade, Jewish children attending integrated schools were the most likely to mention such information. Finally, Study 3 revealed that while all kindergarteners started off at a similar level of essentialism towards ethnicity, exposure affected Arab, but especially Jewish, children's essentialist beliefs. Moreover, there were negative correlations between the salience of and essentialism towards ethnicity. Thus, interethnic exposure alleviated children's essentialist bias towards ethnicity and did so via making children aware of, rather than blind to, ethnic categories.     

God’s categories: The effect of religiosity on children’s teleological and essentialist beliefs about categories

Creationism implies that God imbued each category with a unique nature and purpose. These implications closely correspond to what some cognitive psychologists define as an essentialistic and teleological stance towards categories. This study assessed to what extent the belief in God as creator of categories is related to the mappings of these stances to categories in different domains. Israeli secular and orthodox Jewish 1st and 5th graders responded to questions assessing these three types of beliefs. The results revealed that secular children did not differ from orthodox children with respect to their essentialist beliefs about the stability of animal category membership, and their teleological construal of artifacts. In turn, secular children did differ from orthodox children with respect to their essentialist beliefs about the stability of social category membership, and their teleological construal of both animal and social categories. These findings intimate that while essentialist beliefs about animals, and teleological beliefs about artifacts do not require cultural input in order to emerge, essentialist beliefs about social categories, and teleological beliefs about both animal and social categories do.     

Not So Fast: Reassessing Gender Essentialism in Young Adults

We examined young adults’ essentialist reasoning about gender categories. Previous developmental results suggest that until age 9 or 10, children show marked essentialist reasoning about gender, but this disappears by early adulthood. In contrast, results from social cognition suggest that essentialist thinking about social categories persists into adulthood. To address this discrepancy, 69 undergraduates engaged in a switched-at-birth task under speeded or delayed conditions. Delayed participants made essentialist decisions about physical but not behavioral properties and replicated past findings. Speeded participants showed markedly higher essentialist responding for behavioral properties compared with delayed participants. These findings suggest that gender essentialism does not necessarily diminish in adulthood but instead may be suppressed by more explicit reasoning processes.     

Essentialist beliefs about homosexuality: structure and implications for prejudice

The structure of beliefs about the nature of homosexuality, and their association with antigay attitudes, were examined in three studies (Ns = 309, 487, and 216). Contrary to previous research, three dimensions were obtained: the belief that homosexuality is biologically based, immutable, and fixed early in life; the belief that it is cross-culturally and historically universal; and the belief that it constitutes a discrete, entitative type with defining features. Study 1 supported a three-factor structure for essentialist beliefs about male homosexuality. Study 2 replicated this structure with confirmatory factor analysis, extended it to beliefs about lesbianism, showed that all three dimensions predicted antigay attitudes, and demonstrated that essentialist beliefs mediate associations between prejudice and gender, ethnicity, and religiosity. Study 3 replicated the belief structure and mediation effects in a community sample and showed that essentialist beliefs predict antigay prejudice independently of right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and political conservatism.     

Essentialist beliefs affect children's outgroup empathy,attitudes and prosocial behaviours in a setting of intergroup conflict

Empathy for salient outgroups can promote positive intergroup attitudes and prosocial behaviours. Less is known about which factors may promote empathy, particularly among children, in contexts of intergroup conflict. Empathy may depend on underlying cognitions, such as social essentialist beliefs, that is, believing that certain social categories have an underlying essence that causes members to share observable and non-observable properties. This study explored the influence of essentialist beliefs about ethno-religious categories on outgroup-directed empathy, attitudes and prosocial behaviours of children living in Northern Ireland (N = 88; M = 7.09, SD = 1.47 years old). Bootstrapped chain mediation found that lower essentialist beliefs predicted greater outgroup-directed empathy, which was positively related to outgroup attitudes, which in turn, predicted more outgroup prosocial behaviours. The findings highlight the importance of essentialist beliefs as an underlying factor promoting empathy, with links to prosocial behaviours in settings of intergroup conflict. The intervention implications are discussed.     

Changes in Negative Reciprocity as a Function of Age

Standard economic models assume people exclusively pursue material self‐interests in social interactions. However, people exhibit social preferences; that is, they base their choices partly on the outcomes others obtained in a social interaction. People care about fairness, and reciprocity affects behavior. This study examines the differences in negative reciprocity (costly punishment for unfair divisions) as a function of age. Sixty‐one kindergarteners (5‐year‐olds), 53 second graders (8‐year‐olds), and 57 sixth graders (12‐year‐olds) played a dictator game or a mini–ultimatum game either with a human proposer or with a random machine that determined the division between the two players. By keeping the divisions between the players constant and varying the source of the unfair proposal, we were able to differentiate between reciprocity‐based and inequality‐aversion preferences. We found that kindergarteners proposed and accepted unfair divisions regardless of the source of the offer, behaving according to the standard economic model. Children in the sixth grade tended to reject unfair offers from a human proposer but accept unfair divisions from a random device, indicating the emergence of negative reciprocity preferences by age eight (and contrary to inequality aversion). Children at this age also tended to give more fair offers in the ultimatum game than in the dictator game, indicating the emergence of strategic thinking. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

儿童数字估计的表征模式与发展

探讨中国儿童数字估计的表征模式与发展趋势。包括两个实验,均采用数字线估计任务,实验一以92名幼儿园、一年级及二年级儿童为被试,考察其在0~100范围的数字估计,结果显示,幼儿园儿童在数字估计更多地采用对数表征,而一二年级的儿童在数字估计中更多地采用线性表征;实验二以86名一、三、五年级儿童为被试,考察其在0~1000范围的数字估计,结果显示,一年级儿童有一半采用对数表征,另一半采用线性表征,而三五年级儿童大多采用线性表征。中国儿童的数字估计表现出与美国儿童相同的发展模式,都是由不精确的对数表征逐步向精确的线性表征发展;人的数表征有多种形式,即使在同一年龄阶段,也会因任务难度的不同而选择不同的表征模式。中国儿童精确数字估计能力的出现要早于美国儿童。     

Social skill in third and sixth grade children: A moderator of lifetime stressful life events and behavior problems?

We investigated relationships among stressful lifetime life events, social skill, and behavior problems in children. Participants were 159 third graders, 138 sixth graders, and their mothers. Mothers reported on their children's life events, social skill, and behavior problems. Children self-reported on their social skill and behavior problems. Increased numbers of stressful life events significantly predicted increased behavior problems in third and sixth graders. Increased social skill significantly predicted decreased behavior problems in third and sixth graders. Social skill served a stress-protective role for third but not sixth graders; third graders with increased life events and better social skill had fewer behavior problems than their less socially skilled peers. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed, and suggestions for future resilience research are presented.     

Human Natures: Psychological Essentialism in Thinking about Differences between People

‘Psychological essentialism’ is the belief that members of a category share deep‐seated properties that determine their identity. In the case of social categories, such beliefs have a variety of important implications. We review recent research that shows a central role for essentialist thinking in stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Special attention is paid to beliefs about race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, mental disorder, and personality. Lingering questions about essentialist thinking are discussed, and several directions for future research are suggested.     

Figural factors and the development of pictorial inferences

The role of figural characteristics in the development of pictorial inferences was examined. Two versions of 10 three-picture story sequences were presented to kindergarten and third-grade children. One version maximized while the other minimized figural similarity among pictures. After viewing the sequences, the children were asked to discriminate old study pictures and inferentially consistent new pictures from distractors. While the kindergarteners identified significantly fewer inference pictures than the third graders in all conditions, there was less difference between the grades in the figurally similar conditions. Overall, the kindergarteners identified the fewest inference pictures in the presence of distractors that figurally matched the study pictures. These results indicate that although the pictorial inferences drawn by kindergarteners are heavily influenced by figural representations, such figural dependency cannot account for all of the observed developmental differences.     

On the relationship between category intensions and extensions in children

We contrasted four theories of natural language category acquisition by investigating the relation between category intensions and extensions in children (kindergarteners, second graders, fifth graders) and in college students. Everyone was asked to define a category term, to make category membership judgments of possible exemplars, and to judge whether the possible exemplars possessed features generated by them and by previous adult subjects. Adult judges were also asked to judge whether the possible exemplars possessed the features generated by the subjects. Children's intensions and extensions were very consistent. In addition, children's extensions were reliably smaller than adults', and the features which children generated were more specific than those generated by adults. None of the existing theories discussed can explain this pattern of results. An exemplar-based model is proposed to do so.     

Evidence of more immanent justice responding in adults than children: A challenge to traditional developmental theories

Three studies investigated developmental changes in immanent justice responding by asking participants to respond to vignettes in which a person's bad behaviour was followed by a negative consequence. Study 1 consisted of 152 sixth graders and 128 college students and presented participants with a vignette that examined the notion of bad people deserving to get ill. Study 2 consisted of 185 sixth graders and 154 college students and examined whether children and adults reasoned that that bad behaviour would actually cause the illness. Study 3 consisted of 96 third graders, 115 fifth graders, and 114 college students, and presented participants with vignettes that examined negative behaviours and consequences. Contrary to expectations based on traditional and contemporary developmental theories, all three studies demonstrated more evidence of immanent justice responding among adults than among elementary school children. These results call into question the comprehensiveness of traditional and contemporary developmental theories, and suggest the need to examine cognitive reasoning in adulthood when constructing developmental theories.     

Changes across age groups in self-choice elaboration and incidental memory

This study investigated differences in the self-choice elaboration and an experimenter-provided elaboration on incidental memory of 7- to 12-yr.-olds. In a self-choice elaboration condition 34 second and 25 sixth graders were asked to choose one of the two sentence frames into which each target could fit more congruously, whereas in an experimenter-provided elaboration they were asked to judge the congruity of each target to each frame. In free recall, sixth graders recalled targets in bizarre sentence frames better than second graders for self-choice elaboration condition. An age difference was not found for the experimenter-provided elaboration. In cued recall self-choice elaboration led to better performance of sixth graders for recalling targets than an experimenter-provided elaboration in both bizarre and common sentence frames. However, the different types of elaboration did not alter the recall of second graders. These results were interpreted as showing that the effectiveness of a self-choice elaboration depends on the subjects' age and the type of sentence.     

Children's understanding of food and its functions: A preliminary study of the development of concepts of nutrition

Children's developing conceptions of how the body functions nutritionally were examined. Two different tasks provided converging findings. One task asked children to judge the causes of certain end states (e.g., why X is fat). The second task asked children to judge the result of certain contrasting diets (e.g., twin-1 eats twice as much candy as twin-2). The results evidenced; (a) systematic misconceptions on the part of kindergarteners that were overcome by sixth grade; and (b) other fairly sophisticated conceptions present even at the youngest ages tested. The research provides a needed first step toward describing the naive theories of nutrition possessed by children at different ages. Knowledge of childrens' theories of nutrition are essential for optimal planning of curricula and methods in nutrition education.     

Developmental trends in the understanding of perceptual adaptation

In the first of three studies, kindergartners, third graders, and sixth graders were questioned to determine whether they comprehend five types of perceptual adaptation or contrast effects. The results indicated little consistency among kindergartners, but there were strong improvements by the third-grade level, and at the sixth-grade level almost all of the children were showing perfect performance, demonstrating comprehension of the five forms of perceptual adaptation. In the second and third studies, children and adults were placed in a situation in which adaptation to temperature and weight could occur, and they were asked to predict subsequent perceptions. Correct performance in these studies generally occurred at later ages than in Study 1 with even college students showing incorrect performance in some cases. However, the age trends shifted quite markedly depending upon the nature and structure of the task. The results were consistent with a theory stressing the relation of early formed schemas in the form of memory traces of experiences to later appearing and more abstract schemas. The results show the importance of studying older children when considering developing theories of mind.     

Essentialism and the expression of social stereotypes: a comparative study of Spain, Brasil and England

Over the past few years, one of the most productive directions in the study of the activation and application of stereotypes has been provided by the essentialist concept of categorization. The research presented here studied the impact of two dimensions of essentialist beliefs--naturalism and entitativity-by using data collected from Brazil, Spain and England. The aim was to test whether there was a greater degree of essentialization among the naturalizable categories (sex, age and race) than among the entitative categories (economic condition, religion, political orientation, nationality and social condition). The results not only showed that participants hold more essentialist beliefs with regard to naturalistic categories but also showed the differences in the degree of essentialization across the three cultures. A discussion is conducted on the implications of the present findings, and on the heuristic value of the theoretical model (of the bidimensional nature of essentialism) adopted by this research.     

How does social essentialism affect the development of inter‐group relations?

Psychological essentialism is a pervasive conceptual bias to view categories as reflecting something deep, stable, and informative about their members. Scholars from diverse disciplines have long theorized that psychological essentialism has negative ramifications for inter‐group relations, yet little previous empirical work has experimentally tested the social implications of essentialist beliefs. Three studies (N = 127, ages 4.5–6) found that experimentally inducing essentialist beliefs about a novel social category led children to share fewer resources with category members, but did not lead to the out‐group dislike that defines social prejudice. These findings indicate that essentialism negatively influences some key components of inter‐group relations, but does not lead directly to the development of prejudice.     

Essentialist beliefs about personality and their implications

Two studies examine implicit theories about the nature of personality characteristics, asking whether they are understood as underlying essences. Consistent with the hypothesis, essentialist beliefs about personality formed a coherent and replicable set. Personality characteristics differed systematically in the extent to which they were judged to be discrete, biologically based, immutable, informative, consistent across situations, and deeply inherent within the person. In Study 1, the extent to which characteristics were essentialized was positively associated with their perceived desirability, prevalence, and emotionality. In Study 2, essentialized characteristics were judged to be particularly important for defining people's identity, for forming impressions of people, and for communicating about a third person. The findings indicate that people understand some personality attributes in an essentialist fashion, that these attributes are taken to be valued elements of a shared human nature, and that they are particularly central to social identity and judgment.     

The intergenerational transmission of ethnic essentialism: how parents talk counts the most

The present study analyzed the role of parents as potential sources of children's essentialist beliefs about ethnicity. We tested 76 parent–child (5‐year‐olds) dyads of Jewish Israeli parents from three social groups, defined by the kindergartens children attended: national religious, secular, or Jewish‐Arab integrated. We assessed parents' and children's beliefs, and parents' usage of ethnic attitudinal and categorization markers in a book‐reading activity. Overall, national religious parents manifested the strongest ethnic essentialism and endorsement of anti‐negotiations with Palestinians, and were the most likely to express negative attitudes and mark ethnic categories in their conversations with their children. Moreover, regression analyses revealed that ethnic categorization in parents' speech was the most reliable predictor of children's ethnic essentialism. Ethnic essentialism is transmitted to children not via explicit communication of intergroup beliefs or attitudes, but rather via the sheer marking of categories in ways that resonate with children's own intuitive ways of conceptualizing the social world.