Tell me More! Children’s use of Evidence to Evaluate Negative Claims About Group Members

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

As young as five children begin to develop intergroup attitudes (Dunham et al., 2011), and play an active role in constructing and reinforcing intergroup biases (Over et al., 2017). When evaluating in-group and out-group members, children view both group membership and behavioral evidence as important information; negative behavioral evidence, specifically, plays a stronger role than positive behavioral evidence in establishing group-based generalizations and preferences (Baron & Dunham, 2015). However, little is known about the amount of behavioral evidence children require before evaluating group members. The present study aims to clarify this gap in the literature by determining how much behavioral evidence children require before accepting or rejecting a negative claim about in-group and out-group members, respectively.
Using a minimal group paradigm, distinguished by shirt color, each participant is randomly assigned to either the “Blarks”, who wear green, or the “Zazzes”, who wear orange. Participants are then tasked with deciding if the claim that an individual is “not so nice” is “true” or “not true”. Before making this judgement, participants are presented with an opportunity to learn more about the individual in question, that is, participants can accept the claim with no additional information or choose to learn up to four additional pieces of information before making their final judgment (see Figure 1). By design, all of the available evidence depicts the target individual engaging in negative behaviors (e.g. Henry broke someone’s crayons), thereby confirming the negative claim. With a total of six trials, participants will be asked to evaluate this claim about three in-group members and three out-group members. It is hypothesized that children will choose to learn about more evidence before accepting a negative claim about an in-group member compared to an out-group member.
Data collection is ongoing over Zoom and will be completed by February 2021, allowing ample time to complete all analyses. 72 six- to eight-year-olds will be recruited through multiple platforms including Facebook advertising, neighborhood listservs, parenting blogs, schools, and our university’s infant and child studies database.
To test the hypothesis, a Linear Mixed Model will be fit with the number of pieces of evidence as the response variable and age and trial type (in-group vs. out-group) as predictors. We will also be accounting for repeated measures with random effects for items and participants. Follow-up analyses for both models will be performed to compare means across trail types and ages. Pilot data is promising (N=13) showing that participants require more evidence (M = 2.59, SD = 1.16) to confirm that an in-group member is “not so nice” compared to an out-group member (M = 2.05, SD = 0.90).
This research has implications for understanding how children come to believe negative claims about social group members and can inform future research aimed at countering negative beliefs about different social groups.

Authors

• Jenna Alton, University of Maryland - College Park
  Presenting Author

• Lucas Payne Butler, University of Maryland - College Park
  Non-Presenting Author