The Development of Intersectional Social Prototypes

• In Event: Intersectional Perspectives on the Development of Social Cognition

Abstract

Race and gender information interact to shape representations of social categories. For instance, people often think of the prototypical Black person as male and the prototypical woman as White, leading to a form of intersectional invisibility in perceptions of those whose identities are less prototypical of the categories to which they belong—most notably, Black women (Johnson et al., 2012; Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008). The invisibility produced by such overlapping of race and gender categories can have deleterious social and psychological consequences. For example, people are more likely to forget or misattribute statements made by Black women compared to any other tested race-gender combination (Sesko & Biernat, 2010). Thus, it is critical to understand how these exclusionary social representations develop.
In a series of three studies, we examined age-related trajectories in how race information biases representations of gender across childhood, as well as the psychological mechanisms that underlie these effects. Children completed a speeded categorization task in which they were asked to label photographs of Black, White, and Asian faces as male or female (“boy” or “girl,” for ease of production) as quickly as possible. Following previous categorization research (Mervis & Rosch, 1981), we interpreted slower reaction times (e.g., a tendency to take longer to categorize Black women as female, compared to White or Asian women) as indicating that children’s gender prototypes were biased by race.
Across Study 1 (N=102, Mage=5.82 years; range=3.19-8.54; 52% female, 48% male; 46% White, 27% Asian, and 26% Black), Study 2 (N=84, Mage=5.56 years, range=4.02-8.00; 54% female, 46% male; 48% White, 52% multi-racial), and Study 3 (N=89, Mage=9.30 years, range=7.40-11.47; 51% female, 49% male; 11% Asian, 4% Black, 28% Hispanic, 22% multi-racial, 27% White, 1% Other), children were slower to categorize Black women as women compared to every other race x gender combination, ps< .03. Further, children in all studies were more likely to mis-categorize the gender of Black women than any other target, ps<.001. These tendencies emerged around age 5 and strengthened with age across early childhood (b=-27, SE=10, t=-2.67, p=.008).
In Study 3, we explored various psychological mechanisms that may underlie children’s tendency to exclude Black women from their gender representations in middle childhood, once these biases are more fully entrenched. We found that children who viewed their own identities as more flexible and expansive (operationalized as whether they viewed themselves as sharing identities with people that differed in race and other characteristics) had more inclusive gender representations that were less biased by race, b=35, SE=16, t=2.18, p=.03 (see Figure 2).
We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of children’s social prototypes, as well as the implications for other important phenomena such as stereotyping, and highlight the importance of adopting an intersectional perspective in studying the development of bias.

Authors

• Rachel Leshin, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Ryan Lei, Haverford College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Magnolia Byrne, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marjorie Rhodes, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author