Using explanations to intervene upon children’s social category-based expectations

• In Event: The effect of information in the intergroup context on children's attitudes, behavior, and self-efficacy

Abstract

Children hold an intuitive theory by which they view social categories as moral boundaries (Rhodes & Chalik, 2013). Thus, children view people as obligated to protect and avoid harm to fellow group members, but they do not view this obligation as extending toward members of other groups. This theory guides children as they predict and explain human behavior. Additionally, across the preschool years, children revise their intuitive theories in response to the evidence that they see, often in ways that reify the boundaries that they perceive between members of different groups.
How might we encourage children to focus less on social category boundaries as they navigate the world? In this talk, I will present one study investigating whether targeted explanations might serve this purpose. Four- to 7-year-old children (current N = 97, intended N = 256, anticipated to be complete by January, 2021) were introduced to two novel groups (the blue Flurps and the red Zazzes) and were asked to predict whether harmful and prosocial behaviors would play out within or across group boundaries. Then, they were exposed to additional harmful and prosocial behaviors, but now for each behavior, they were given an explanation. In one condition, these explanations were nonsense (e.g., “The Flurp stole a cookie from the Zazz because a butterfly flapped its wings”), and in the other condition, these explanations were plausible, but not related to group membership (e.g., “The Flurp stole a cookie from the Zazz because he was really hungry.”). Then, the children were asked to predict a new set of harmful and prosocial behaviors.
Children revised their expectations of social behaviors differently depending on whether or not they heard plausible explanations for those behaviors. For children who heard nonsense explanations, after hearing the explanations, they predicted between-group harm and within-group prosociality at rates even higher than they had at baseline (harm: Mbefore = .357, Mafter = .214, 2 (1) = 8.35, p = .004; prosociality: Mbefore = .827, Mafter = .917, 2 (1) = 9.13, p = .003). In other words, they used the evidence of behavior that they saw to strengthen their theory and bolster their reliance on social categories to predict future behaviors. For children who heard plausible explanations, however, after hearing the explanations, there was no change in their predictions (harm: Mbefore = .347, Mafter = .328, p = .652; prosociality: Mbefore = .789, Mafter = .833, p = .245). Thus, these children did not use the behaviors that they saw to change their reliance on category boundaries; the explanations that they heard seem to have stopped them from doing so (three-way interaction: 2 (1) = 3.63, p = .057, see Figure 1). These findings suggest that providing children with targeted explanations for social behavior can encourage them to revise their intuitive theories in ways that promote positivity and reduce negativity across social group boundaries.

Author

• Lisa Chalik, Skidmore College
  Presenting Author