Poster #188 - Effect of social stereotypes on perspective-taking abilities from childhood to adolescence.

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

The capacity to adopt someone else perspective (i.e., third person perspective, 3PP) is critical for the development of social interactions (Tversky & Hard, 2009) and for the development of theory of mind (Carpendale, & Lewis, 2006). Several studies converge in showing that school-aged children and adults’ ability to adopt a 3PP remains challenging in certain contexts. For instance, in the Own-Body Transformation task (i.e., OBT task, Blanke & al., 2005), participants are less efficient to determine in which hand an avatar is holding a gray ball when the avatar is front-facing than back-facing them in part because participants need to inhibit their first-person perspective to adopt a 3PP (Aïte, & al., 2016). Given that spatial perspective-taking abilities play a role in ToM and that ToM abilities can be affected by social stereotypes (Chalik, Rivera, & Rhodes, 2014), we investigated whether the capacity to adopt a 3PP is affected by the ethnicity of the person one needs to adopt the perspective of.
We asked 44 Caucasian children (M = 9.8 ± .7 years of age, 21 girls, 23 boys) and 42 Caucasian adolescents (M = 13.3 ± 0.7 years of age, 14 girls, 28 boys) to perform an adaptation of the OBT task. On each of the 48 trials, participants were instructed to press the left button of the mouse when the avatar held the gray ball in its left hand and the right button when the avatar held the gray ball in its right hand. The avatar could either be Caucasian or African and could be presented in a front-facing or a back-facing position (see figure 1).
Age group (children vs adolescents) x Avatar ethnicity (Caucasian vs African) x Avatar position (back-facing vs front-facing avatar) mixed-design Analysis of Variance on the proportion of correct answers revealed a main effect of angle, F(1,85) = 26.76, p < .001, η² = .24, a main effect of age group, F(1,85) = 8.64, p < .01, η² = .09 and a significant three-way interaction between Age group, Avatar ethnicity and Avatar position, F(1,85) = 4.68, p < .05, η² = .05. Importantly, Post-hoc comparisons corrected with a Holm-Bonferroni method showed that the proportion of correct answers was higher (a) for back-facing than front-facing avatars, (b) in adolescents than in children, and (c) for front-facing Caucasians avatars than front-facing African avatars in adolescents but not in children (see figure 2).
Taken together, our results suggest that adopting a 3PP might be affected by ethnic stereotypes held against the person we have to adopt the perspective of and that these ethnic stereotypes start to affect the ability to adopt a 3PP in adolescence not in late childhood.

Authors

• Manali Draperi, Paris Descartes University
  Presenting Author

• Ania Aïte, Paris Descartes University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Olivier Houdé, University Paris Descartes
  Non-Presenting Author

• Grégoire Borst, Paris Descartes University
  Non-Presenting Author