Poster #16 - Theory of Mind and Social Categorization in Preschoolers

• In Event: Poster Session 12

Abstract

Social categories allow us to effectively reason about shared beliefs, preferences, and behaviors of social category members. However, social categorization can also lead to overgeneralizations (i.e., stereotypes) of social group properties to individual group members (Bigler & Liben, 2007). There is evidence that children with a better theory of mind (ToM) - i.e., the ability to reason about the individual mental states of others - are less likely to endorse stereotypes (Mulvey, Rizzo, & Killen, 2016) or use social categories to infer individual behavior (Chalik et al., 2014). However, most evidence to date is only correlational in nature. The purpose of the current study is to assess whether a training program designed to improve ToM in preschoolers will also produce changes in children’s social categorization. That is, whether improvements in ToM will make children less reliant on social category membership when reasoning about individual behavior.
Recruitment is still ongoing. Twenty-four children between the ages of 3.0 and 4.5 years of age have participated in a training study that consisted of two separate sessions conducted over the course of a week at their childcare facility. Children were randomly assigned to one of two ToM training conditions: (1) In the experimental condition, children were read stories containing examples of false belief, (2) In the control condition, children were read similar stories that did not contain false belief. The training was repeated each session. Pre- and post-training assessments were also conducted for both ToM and social categorization. The Theory of Mind Scale (Wellman & Liu, 2004) was used to assess ToM and across progressively complex scenarios. Higher scores indicated better ToM. Social categorization was assessed using a task developed by Chalik and colleagues (2014). Children were first introduced to novel social groups (e.g., Flurps and Zazzes). On test trials, children had to make inferences about a target character’s behavior (e.g., “The Flurp pushed somebody. Who did the Flurp push?”) using either information about their mental state (“This Flurp is really mad at this other Flurp. The Flurp is not mad at the Zazz.”) or information about their social category (i.e,. “Did the Flurp push the other Flurp or did the Flurp push the Zazz?”). Higher scores on this task indicated that children were more likely to use mental state information (e.g., predict that the character should harm someone they are mad at) than social category information (e.g., predict that a character should harm someone outside of their social group) when reasoning about individual behavior.
Preliminary results indicate greater improvement on the social categorization task for children in the experimental training group (M = .67) than children in the control (M = -.25). If this pattern holds, it would suggest that training theory of mind abilities may directly impact children’s reliance on social categories when reasoning about individual behavior. Specifically, learning to reason about individual mental states could help children avoid making overgeneralizations based on social group membership. Results may also inform interventions aimed at optimizing social development in early childhood.

Authors

• Kailey Jean Karder, Bradley University
  Presenting Author

• Valerie San Juan, Bradley University