Poster #73 - How Social Status Influences Prototypicality: Evidence from Novel and Real-World Social Groups

• In Event: Poster Session 20

Abstract

In the U.S, White people, specifically White men, are seen as prototypical–or most representative–of “people” (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008). Although socially constructed, lay beliefs about prototypes have serious, real-world consequences related to stereotyping and intergroup judgments. Recent developmental studies found that children by age five already possess racialized gender prototypes (e.g., Lei et al., 2020; Leshin et al., 2022) that align with adults’. Open questions concern the developmental processes that give rise to social prototypes.
The present research examines whether social status of a social group shapes children’s perception of the group’s representativeness. Because hierarchical structures produce biases that perpetuate group-based inequality (e.g., Cole, 2009; Roberts & Rizzo, 2021), we hypothesized that children would perceive groups of high status as more representative of people than groups of low status. Given that social status, race, and gender intersect and are difficult to detangle in the real world, we used novel social groups to isolate the role of social status.
Adapting methods from Lei et al. (2020), 4- to 9-year-old participants (N = 102) were introduced to Daxie, a puppet, who wanted to learn about different things. Children were told about a planet far away and two groups of people on this planet: the Orangies and Greenies. One group is richer and has more power than the other group (which group occupies higher social status was counterbalanced). Next, we asked participants to select a person from either group to put in a book to teach Daxie about the people, girls, boys, Orangies, and Greenies on this planet. In addition, we adopted a measure from Lei et al. (2021) to tie our results to early representations of real-world social categories. Participants were asked to select a child from a group of Black and White children to put in the book to teach Daxie about people, girls, and boys from our planet.
For novel social groups, we found that 8- to 9-year-olds (M = 0.75; t(35) = 3.4, p = .002), but not 4- to 5-year-olds (M = 0.64; t(30) = 1.6, p = .107) or 6- to 7-year-olds (M= 0.54; t(34) = 0.5, p = .619), chose the high-status group significantly more than the low-status group when asked to teach Daxie about people on the planet. Consistent with our prediction, children expected groups of high status to be more prototypical than groups of low status. For real-world social groups, we replicated past work (Lei et al., 2021). Across the age range, participants chose White children significantly more than Black children when asked to teach Daxie about people (M = 0.77; t(101) = 6.6, p < .001), girls (M = 0.76; t(101) = 6.3, p < .001), and boys (M= 0.67; t(101) = 3.5, p < .001) on our planet.
Our findings suggest that children believe that groups with advantaged social status are more representative categories than disadvantaged groups. Thus, social hierarchies shape children’s prototypicality beliefs, which may lead to downstream effects on stereotypes and intergroup relations.

Authors

• Vanessa Lazaro, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Lin Bian, University of Chicago