1-022 - All for one and one for all: Consequences of group membership in young children

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Social categories structure our social world, and from early in development children use social information as a guide for their behavior for both good and ill. This symposium addresses the remarkable influence that group membership has on a variety of social and cognitive aspects of children’s lives, bringing together important new research from four different perspectives.
Being a member of a group entails certain obligations that determine behavior and expectations towards in- and out-group members. The first speaker will talk about commitments towards in-group members, showing that 5-year-old children already understand and value loyalty to the group, and that they are willing to pay a cost in order to be loyal towards their own group. The second talk focuses on behavioral obligations in the intergroup context. The speaker will show how young children use social categories when predicting intergroup behavior, and how parents’ communication influences children’s theories about intergroup obligations. Apart from consequences on the behavioral level, group membership also influences children’s cognition, in both negative (e.g., attitudes) and positive (e.g., motivation) ways. The next presentation will address the negative consequences of group membership and present research on children’s use of stereotypes and discrimination, focusing on the developmental trajectory from children’s category-based prejudice to explicit discrimination on the interindividual level. The positive consequences of group membership will be addressed in the last talk, in which the speaker will show how group membership can enhance children’s motivation on academic tasks, and how this effect is moderated by identification with the group.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Yarrow C Dunham, Yale

Individual Presentations

• Stick together: Young children’s loyalty to the group - Presenting Author: Antonia Misch, Max Planck Inst for Evol Anthropology; Harriet Over, York University; Malinda Carpenter, University of St. Andrews

• How preschool-age children use social categories to predict social behavior - Presenting Author: Lisa Chalik, New York University Graduate School of Arts and Science; Marjorie Rhodes, New York University

• The road from prejudice to discrimination runs through (actual acts of) categorization - Presenting Author: Yarrow C Dunham, Yale

• The power of in-groups: Group identification enhances preschoolers’ motivation for shared academic goals - Presenting Author: Allison Master, University of Washington; Andrew N Meltzoff, Univ of Washington; Sapna Cheryan, University of Washington