Children’s Descriptive-to-Prescriptive Tendency Predicts Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Race-Based Normativity

• In Event: 3-182 - What are Norms Good For? Outcomes Related to Children’s Early Attention to Social Norms

Integrative Statement

Children interpret how a group is as evidence for how individual group members should be, and this descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency, which biases children against non-conformity, emerges early in development, is easy to elicit, and is robust across cultures (Roberts, Guo, Ho, & Gelman, 2018). We questioned whether this tendency predicted prejudice and discrimination toward individuals who violate group norms, and whether this tendency predicted stereotyping toward real-world categories. Specifically, we examined young children’s feelings and resources distributions toward non-conforming individuals, and whether their descriptive-to-prescriptive reasoning predicted their stereotyping in gender- and race-based contexts.

Children (N = 110; age: 4-5) were introduced to two novel groups, Hibbles and Glerks, who were characterized by contrasting descriptive group norms (e.g., the type of berry they ate). Children were then presented with individual Hibbles or Glerks who conformed or did not conform to the behaviors of their in-group. After seeing each individual Hibble or Glerk, children judged whether it was ok or not ok for the target to engage in a particular behavior, and if not ok, how bad it was to do so. Then, children saw two individuals, one conforming and one non-conforming, and were asked several questions that assessed their prejudice toward the individuals (e.g., whether they would like to be friends with the individual, whether the individual is good or bad). Children were also shown a picture of varying amounts of gold and asked how much they would give the individuals if they could. Three- to seven days later, children completed two tasks that assessed their tendency to engage in gender-stereotyping (e.g., whether it was ok for boys to wear nail polish, or for girls to play with trucks) and race stereotyping (i.e., children completed a task similar to the Hibbles/Glerks task, but with real racial groups that differed in the candy they ate, language they spoke, games they played, and music they listened to).

Replicating past work (Roberts et al., 2018), children evaluated non-conformity more negatively than conformity. Moreover, children showed more negativity toward non-conforming individuals and more positivity toward conforming individuals, and they allocated fewer resources to non-conforming individuals than to conforming individuals. Moreover, the extent to which children viewed non-conformity negatively on the Hibbles/Glerks task significantly predicted their race-based stereotyping at the second time point, but not their gender-based stereotyping.

The current findings replicate past findings showing that children generally disapprove of individual group members who violate descriptive group norms. These findings also extent past work by showing that children express negative feelings and discriminatory behavior toward non-conforming individuals, and that descriptive-to-prescriptive reasoning on a novel group task can predict their stereotyping in race-based contexts, but not in gender-based contexts. One possibility is that children in the current study, mostly from liberal, upper-middle-class families, were generally accepting of gender non-conformity: even children who were unaccepting of non-conformity on the Hibbles/Glerks task showed relatively low negativity toward gender non-conforming targets, whose non-conformity concerned well-known gender stereotypes. Future studies should further explore how children’s normativity functions differently in race- versus gender-based contexts and how sociocultural background shapes children’s normativity.

Authors

• Cai Guo, Stanford University
  Presenting Author

• Michelle Wang, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Eliza Margaret Van Wye, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Steven O. Roberts, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author