1-177 - The Implications of Children’s Social Essentialist Beliefs on Attitudes and Behavior

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Essentialist thinking is grounded in the belief that categories have important underlying qualities that define their nature. Developmental work has documented that essentialist beliefs about animal categories (e.g., tigers) and certain social categories (e.g., gender, race) emerge early in development. Yet much less work has examined the processes that give rise to these beliefs or—critically, in the case of social categories—their implications for social behavior.

This session brings together four lines of research that incorporate multiple theoretical and methodological approaches toward understanding how social essentialism develops and its consequences for children’s social behavior. Using language to experimentally elicit essentialist beliefs for a novel social group, Marjorie Rhodes shows that essentialism increases the salience of group boundaries and leads children to share fewer resources with outgroups. Relatedly, Sarah Gaither investigates how essentialist beliefs about race affect racial outgroup sharing tendencies differentially for girls versus boys. Comparing Northern Ireland and the United States, John Coley’s research suggests that attending segregated schools increases essentialist thinking as children grow older. Lastly, Katya Saunders, demonstrates that subtle linguistic cues cause children to develop essentialist beliefs about categories like scientist or mathematician, which in turn negatively influence girls’ persistence in related tasks. Together, these talks address how several developmental factors (e.g., exposure to social diversity or to certain forms of language) underlie the development of social essentialism and provide some of the first evidence of the behavioral consequences of these beliefs (ranging from intergroup relations to children’s own achievement behaviors).

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Sarah Elizabeth Gaither, Univ of Chicago

• Marjorie Rhodes, New York University

Individual Presentations

• Social Essentialism and its Effects on the Development of Intergroup Attitudes - Presenting Author: Marjorie Rhodes, New York University; Sarah-Jane Leslie, Princeton University; Katya D Saunders, New York University; Yarrow C Dunham, Yale; Andrei Cimpian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Adopting Essentialist Beliefs Affects Racial Outgroup Sharing Tendencies - Presenting Author: Sarah Elizabeth Gaither, Univ of Chicago; Stacey N Doan, Boston University; Samuel R. Sommers, Tufts University

• How Context Affects Social Essentialist Category Knowledge in Northern Ireland and the USA - Presenting Author: John D. Coley, Northeastern University; Kirsty Smyth, Queen's University, Belfast, UK; Aidan Feeney, Queen's University, Belfast; R. Cole Cole Eidson, Northeastern University

• Essentialist Beliefs About Scientists Affect Children’s Motivation - Presenting Author: Katya D Saunders, New York University; Marjorie Rhodes, New York University; Sarah-Jane Leslie, Princeton University