21- Developmental Perspectives Flashcards
1- Nonverbal recognition & preference for social categories in infants
How to Think About Development: General note for understanding when children “learn X”:
* Children vary a lot in when they develop certain capacities
* Age ranges should be viewed like a measure of central tendency (e.g.,
mean, median) rather than a rule.
Nonverbal Recognition
How to measure recognition of social categories?
Inferring novelty from eye gaze duration.
The habituation paradigm
(look at it less and less the more times you show it as it becomes more familiar)
Novelty vs. Preference
Looking time can assess both:
Recognition of novelty, difference, or change:
When a pre-existing stimulus has been completely encoded
Preference:
When a pre-existing stimulus hasn’t been completely encoded
Novelty Example
Fagan & Singer (1979)
Sample: 5-6 month olds
Design:
1. Habituate to a photo
2. See a new photo of someone who is similar or different in gender or age
DV: Looking time at new photo
o Habituation = Complete encoding, so recognition
Results: more looking time for an older (age) woman who looks different to original woman, less looking time for woman who looks similar to first, more looking time for a man (gender)
Preference Example
Kelly et al. (2005)
Sample: White newborns AND 3-month olds
Design: Saw images of people from different races (NO HABITUATION)
DV: Looking time
* No habituation, so looking time reflects preference
Results:
Newborns: No race-based difference in looking time
3-month-olds: More looking time for White faces
Main Point: Nonverbal preferences based on race develop with experience (not born with it)
2- Conscious recognition of social categories
Two rules for when awareness of social categories develops:
1. Visibility of social category
2. Primacy of social category in everyday life
Awareness of gender develops early (2-3 years)
Race/ethnicity comes later (5 years and up)
* In the United States, White children can generally distinguish:
o Black people first
o Asian, Latinx, and Native American people later
o However, lots of variation!
How Do Children vs. Adults Determine Race?
Sample: Adults & 4-9 year olds in Northeast US (81% White, 11% Black, 8% other)
Design: Participants saw White & Black faces, had to label as “White or European American” or “Black or African American”.
* Faces differed in skin color & facial features (physiognomy)
Main Point: Adults rely on a combination of skin color & facial features;
children rely primarily on skin color (see more specific graphs)
Thinking about Race as Essential
One study looked at the development of race as an immutable or essential feature of a person.
5-6 year olds, 9-10 year olds, and adults viewed images of White and Black kids and adults that were expressing either a happy or angry expression.
On each trial, participants saw a photo of one child who was making either a happy or angry expression and then:
One same-race adult making a different expression
One other-race adult making the same expression
Participants then had to choose – when the child grows up, which one will he be?
Results found that 9-10 year old White children as well as White adults viewed race as more important than emotion when making predictions.
White 5-6 year olds used race much less compared to White 9-10 year olds, though racial minority 5-6 year olds were also more likely to use race.
Understanding Race as a Sensitive Issue
As children become more aware of race as an aspect of one’s social identity, they also become aware of the cultural norm of hesitancy to discuss race directly (“colorblindness”).
In fact, children may learn to avoid discuss race even in situations where the situation might demand it.
One study investigated how far children would go in avoiding to discuss
race by using a modified version of the game “Guess Who?”
-Race-Relevant Condition
-Race-Neutral Condition
Results found a key difference when testing 8-9 year olds vs. 10-11 year olds.
8-9 year olds asked roughly the same amount of questions in both conditions, whereas 10-11 year olds needed more questions to get to the right answer in the race-relevant condition.
End result is that younger kids did better on the task when race was introduced.
3- Development of Racial Prejudice
Two important factors for development of racial prejudice:
1. Are you a member of a majority or minority group?
2. How much contact do you have with members of minority groups?
Main Point: Prejudice depends on majority/minority group
status & amount of contact
More specific:
highest prejudice for majority + low contact, medium prejudice for majority + high contact, lowest prejudice for minority
Changes in explicit racial prejudice in white children:
first more explicit liking for white people, then explicit liking for races becomes the same as older (9-10 years old)
Implicit Attitudes Across Development
N = 79 (predominantly) White participants in Boston
* 27 kindergartners, 30 5th graders, 22 adults
Results: self-reported (explicit) preference for white over black people goes down with age, but IMPLICIT pro-white attitude stays the same (bias across age)
1. What explains the pattern in explicit racial
prejudice?
Why explicit prejudice declines:
o Learn social and cultural norms about race
o Internalize moral lessons about equality & fairness
2. What explains the pattern in implicit racial
prejudice? (stable)
-stability of attitude
-stability of cultural messages (ex: same messages shown on tv when child and adult)
-Implicit prejudice
increases, but adults get better at controlling them
Implicit Attitudes Among Children
A recent study investigated the implicit and explicit race attitudes (towards Black,
White and Chinese people) among children growing up in Cameroon.
The researchers collected 30 participants from the following age ranges:
3-6, 6-9, 9-12, 12-15, 15-18, 18-30
Implicit attitudes were measured using an adapted IAT and explicit attitudes were measured by preferences for own-race versus other-race people in a variety of
scenarios:
This summer your mother will take you to a swimming class. In the class, you can choose one person to coach you to swim. Which one would you like to choose?
Results revealed differences across the life span for how implicit and explicit attitudes change over time.
Implicit preference: highest for ingroup, then white people over chinese until about 12, then chinese over white
Explicit preference: higher for chinese than white….. (see graph because in percentage of own-race chosen…)???
4- Development of gender prejudice
- Preferences for one’s own gender develop early, by ages 3-4
o Recall: awareness of gender is around 2-3
Gender role interviews (which doll does what) - Gender preferences decline around puberty
o Why? Probably (heterosexual) attraction
Development of Gender Stereotypes
Bian, Jane-Leslie & Cimpian, 2017
Girls as young as six years old were less likely than boys to report that members of
their gender are “really, really smart”.
These beliefs in turn predicted less interest in activities that were believed to be for “really, really smart” people.
Example Outcome: Which person is “really, really smart”?
While five-year olds thought their own gender was more likely to be smart, starting
at age six both boy and girl participants thought men were smarter.
This difference between 5-year olds and 6-year olds carried over into interest in
games that were described as for ”really smart people”.
Zarky = game for “really, really smart” people. At 5, girls were interested to try it. At 6, wayyy more boys than girls wanted to try it
‘Draw A Scientist’ Task
-draw men
A recent meta-analysis covering over forty years, 78 studies, and over 20,000
participants found that the gender bias in the ‘Draw a Scientist’ task is decreasing
over time, but not substantially.
For girls, the rate of drawing a male scientist also increases with age.
5- Reducing Racial Prejudice Among Children
A recent study investigated whether children’s racial biases could be changed by reading a children’s story that featured a crossrace friendship. The sample was split between Kindergarteners
(5-6 years old) and second-graders (7-8 years old).
They also manipulated whether the person reading the story to the child was Black (outgroup) or White (ingroup). They also measured each child’s “reconciliation skills”, which is
the ability to accept whether others’ judgments (that differ from their own judgments) are valid (i.e., it’s expected that other people will differ from you in ways that are okay).
Results:
Kindergarteners thought that both Black and White readers
would have more positive attitudes towards White people.
Second-graders thought that the Black and White readers
would prefer their racial ingroup, and this was particularly true for kids who had higher reconciliation skills.
The storybook intervention had no effect on children’s own racial attitudes.
One reason for the lack of the success of the storybook
manipulation is that children mostly assumed that the
person reading the book largely shared their own racial prejudices.
Young children may not possess the ”cognitive structure to engage with an antibias perspective.”
One hurdle for effective interventions for kids is to
understand and appreciate what cognitive skills (e.g.,
generalizing) are needed for a message to be effective.
