Decategorization Leads Preschoolers to Share the Same With Ingroup and Outgroup Members

• In Event: 1-034 - How Do Social Groups Guide Children’s Sociomoral Reasoning?

Integrative Statement

Humans are not only social, but also cultural creatures who identify with their own group and engage in within-group cooperation (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Deci & Ryan, 2008; Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004). The tendency to think in terms of social categories – “us” and “them” – may lead to enhanced prosocial behaviors toward members of our own group as compared with outgroup individuals (ingroup favoritism), or even to outgroup discrimination and prejudice (Rutland, Killen, & Abrams, 2010; Tajfel & Turner, 1986). One powerful candidate to overcome ingroup bias and parochialism is decategorization (Brewer, 1996; Cameron et al., 2006), that is, the process that leads people to see others as individuals rather than as members of a category, for instance, by stressing individuating information about category members. Here we investigated preschoolers’ responsiveness to decategorization using a dictator game to measure children’s prosocial behavior in an intergroup context. We hypothesized that children would treat ingroup and outgroup individuals in similar ways in a decategorized context, but that they would favor ingroup members in a typical intergroup context.
Eighty 5- to 6-year-old children (M = 72 months; 60 – 83 months; 40 girls) participated in the study. Children were native German speakers and came from mixed socio-economic backgrounds from a large German city. For the experimental manipulation, a two (recipient identity: personal vs. impersonal; between-participants) by two (group membership: ingroup vs. outgroup; within-participants) mixed-design was used. The recipients were presented either in an impersonal way (focus on category membership) or in a personal way (focus on individuating information, e.g., name and personal preferences). For group membership, we used two cues: color and location (own kindergarten vs. “foreign region”). As dependent measure, we used the number of stickers (out of six) the child distributed to each interaction partner (ingroup and outgroup member).
As predicted, we found a significant interaction effect between recipient identity and group membership, F(1,78) = 4.34, p = .04. Planned comparisons revealed that children shared more stickers with the ingroup member than with the outgroup individual in the impersonal condition, t(39) = 2.89, p = .01, but that they shared the same amount of stickers with both types of recipients in the personal condition, t(39) = 0.14, p = .89 (see Figure 1).
Overall, children shared more stickers with ingroup versus outgroup members when category membership was emphasized, but they shared equally when the recipients were presented as individuals. These findings suggest that the presentation of outgroup members as individuals may be a powerful tool to reduce ingroup bias and to foster equal treatment of ingroup and outgroup members in preschool children.

Authors

• Anja Kassecker, LMU Munich
  Presenting Author

• Marco F. H. Schmidt, LMU Munich; University of Bremen
  Non-Presenting Author