Idealized Gender Prototypes Across Development

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

Younger children hold more idealized prototypes of familiar animal categories than older children or adults (Foster-Hanson & Rhodes, 2019a). For example, 5- to 6-year-old children think that the most representative and informative animal category members are those that are most extreme on characteristic features (e.g., the very fastest cheetah), with a gradual shift across childhood towards thinking of average category members in this way in order to account for within-category variability (e.g., the average-speeded cheetah). In the current pre-registered study with children ages 3- to 10-years-old and adults (N = 267), we asked whether younger children also think of gender categories more in terms of idealized prototypes. Specifically, we hypothesized that young children think of members of gender categories that are most extreme on stereotypical features (e.g., the girl who wears the most pink) as the most representative and informative about their categories (e.g., girls).

Children and adults made judgements about which members of gender categories (boys and girls) were the most representative and informative about their kinds, using simplified scales of five exemplars varying from least to most extreme on a category-characteristic feature (e.g., girls wearing more or less pink, boys with longer or shorter hair). For comparison, participants also made judgments about familiar animal categories, as in previous work (Foster-Hanson & Rhodes, 2019a). Half of participants judged which category member was most representative of its kind, by choosing one to put in a book to teach someone else about the category. The other half judged which category member should get a prize for being the “best” of its kind. Then, all participants judged which category member was the most informative about its kind, by choosing whether an unseen category member would share a novel property with the average category member or the most extreme one. Data were collected online using unmoderated remote research: the study was presented as short videos and verbally-narrated questions which children and adults answered by clicking on designated “buttons” to indicate their responses (Rhodes et al., 2020).

As predicted, we found that representativeness and informativeness judgments varied by age, with younger children choosing more extreme category members as both representative (LR X^2 (4) = 25.25, p < .001) and informative (LR X^2 (4) = 44.70, p < .001), similarly for animal and social categories. Judgements about which category members were the “best” of their kinds varied by age and category (LR X^2 (8) = 28.25, p < .001; Figure 1). For adults, judgments about social categories also varied by social political views and endorsement of ambivalent sexism: more socially conservative adults who endorsed more ambivalent sexism chose more extreme social category members (e.g., girls wearing more pink) as both representative (LR X^2 (1) = 8.31, p = .003) and informative about their kinds (LR X^2 (1) = 10.32, p = .001). The current findings thus shed light on the role of category ideals in the development of social prototypes, as well as how these prototypes vary across political and social views.

Authors

• Emily Foster-Hanson, Princeton University
  Presenting Author

• Marjorie Rhodes, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author