Overhearing Brief Negative Messages about Social Groups has Lasting Influences on Children’s Intergroup Attitudes

• In Event: How Children Learn about the Social World from Others' Messages

Abstract

In recent years, many regions of the world have experienced increases in the expression of intergroup biases. Significant individual differences in the valence and magnitude of these biases suggest that socialization influences their development (Over & McCall, 2018). One way in which children's intergroup attitudes may be socialized is through information that they encounter in others' messages. Indeed, recent research has identified that children's intergroup attitudes are influenced by the opinions that others express to children (Baron et al., 2014; Diesendruck & Menahem, 2015; Gonzalez et al., 2017; Lane et al., 2020). However, not everything that children learn is directly taught to them. For example, even toddlers can learn about novel words or tools by overhearing conversations between nearby adults or from adult conversations on video (e.g., Akhtar, 2001, 2005; Boderé & Jaspaert, 2017; Gampe et al., 2012; Shneidman & Woodward, 2015). We investigate how overhearing derogatory messages about a novel social group from an unfamiliar speaker (indirectly, from a caller on a nearby video chat) influences children's attitudes towards that group, and we explore potential developmental differences in the force of such messages among children in early and middle childhood.

Method
While playing a picture-finding game, a diverse sample of children from the Southeastern U.S. (3.75- to 9.25-years, n=121) overheard a video call between a researcher (who was in the room with the child) and a caller. During the 'message' condition, the caller made negative claims about a novel social group (e.g., "Those Gearoos are really bad people, they eat disgusting food and wear such weird clothes, the Gearoos' language sounds so ugly"). During the “no message” condition, the caller made no claims about the group. Children's intergroup attitudes were measured by the researcher immediately following the video call, and by a different researcher two weeks later. Measures of children's intergroup attitudes included children's overall evaluation of the group (ranging from 'very not good' to 'very good'), their willingness to befriend someone from the novel group (yes or no), their interest in engaging with five elements of the group's culture (e.g., their food, clothing), and their willingness to share a desired resource (stickers) with the group.

Results & Discussion
For each measure of children's intergroup attitudes, a multilevel regression analysis was conducted (with age as a continuous variable, and time nested within participant) to explore how age-related trends in children's attitudes compared for children who did vs. did not hear the message, and whether such trends persisted across two weeks. Table 1 presents an example of our analyses and model-reduction strategy. Similar results were obtained for most depend variables (except for resource sharing). As depicted in Figure 1, with increasing age, older children (7- to 9-years) who overheard the message demonstrated stronger negative attitudes toward the group than children who heard no message. Younger children's (4- to 5-year-olds') attitudes were generally unaffected by these claims. Thus, overhearing brief messages from strangers during a video-call had robust and lasting effects on the social biases of children 7-years and older.

Authors

• Emily Conder, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author

• Jonathan D. Lane, Vanderbilt University
  Non-Presenting Author