1-141 - Harnessing cognitive biases to promote positive attitudes and behavior

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

All children are biased, in one way or another. For instance, children from an early age prefer individuals who help over individuals who hinder (Hamlin et al., 2007), they assume that there must be a reason for why the world is the way it is (Schmidt & Rakoczy, 2017), and they often attribute individual differences to innate traits rather than social structures (Dweck, 2008; Gelman, 2003). Building off of this work, this symposium brings together three different lines of research centered around one simple question: How can we harness such biases to make society a more positive place? The first paper demonstrates that children are deeply motivated to maintain a positive reputation (and to avoid a negative reputation), and suggests that harnessing this concern can encourage children to be more generous and prosocial toward others. The second paper demonstrates that children interpret how a group is as evidence for how individual group members should be, and proposes that manipulating this descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency may facilitate greater tolerance toward individuals. The third paper demonstrates that children who attribute race hierarchies to society, rather than to nature, show greater pro-Black attitudes, and suggests that modifying how children think about racial hierarchy can disrupt the development of race bias. The discussant (an expert on the mechanisms that underlie prosocial behavior and empathy), will discuss the impact of this work as well as steps for future investigation and intervention.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Steven O. Roberts, Stanford University

Discussant

• Paul Bloom, Yale University

Individual Presentations

• Young children’s reputational strategies in a peer group context - Presenting Author: Jan Engelmann, Yale University; Non-Presenting Author: Diotima Rapp, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Non-Presenting Author: Esther Herrmann, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Non-Presenting Author: Michael Tomasello, Duke University

• Using group norms to modify what is socially and morally acceptable - Presenting Author: Steven O. Roberts, Stanford University; Non-Presenting Author: Arnold Ho, University of Michigan; Non-Presenting Author: Susan Gelman, University of Michigan

• Modifiable processes underlying the development of race bias - Presenting Author: Marjorie Rhodes, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Michael Rizzo, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Emily Green, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Yarrow Dunham, Yale; Non-Presenting Author: Emile Bruneau, University of Pennsylvania