Can Structural Explanations Mitigate Essentialist Construals of Both Novel and Familiar Social Groups?

• In Event: Youth’s Conceptions of Prejudice and Inequality Across Contexts: Evidence from Asia, Europe, and North America

Abstract

Much of children’s knowledge about social groups comes from hearing generic claims (e.g. "Women work as nurses"). Unfortunately, generics can perpetuate discrimination by triggering essentialist construals of social kinds (Diesendruck & Menahem, 2015; Gelman, 2003; Rhodes et al., 2012). For novel categories and/or properties, this can be mitigated by structural information about stable external forces acting on category members (Vasilyeva et al., 2018; Vasilyeva & Lombrozo, 2020). Yet it remains unclear whether structural information can reframe previously-formed essentialist construals of known properties of familiar social groups. Yang et al. (2021) find that structural cues are less effective in dislodging discriminatory behaviors involving familiar gender groups, but it is unclear whether these effects are driven by pre-existing attitudes (e.g., against boys playing with dolls) or category/property familiarity itself. Here we examine whether structural framings of generics can revise children’s beliefs about both familiar and novel social groups, controlling for property content.

Method
We presented 144 12-15-year-olds (M=13.6) in Gujarat, India with generic claims either about familiar caste and gender categories, or about novel equivalents. Importantly, the attributed properties were the same for the familiar and novel groups (e.g., “Dalits/Vods work as street sweepers and latrine cleaners”; “Women/Neps work as nurses in hospitals”). The framing of category-property associations varied across participants: the Internalist-Essentialist framing emphasized inherent predispositions (“[Women/Neps] are naturally very caring and nurturing. They are good at taking care of others, and they enjoy it”); the Structural framing cited stable external constraints (“[In India/Yaree-kingdom, women/neps] have very little power. (…) People who are more powerful put barriers between women and good jobs that pay a lot of money. The jobs that (…) do not pay well are the only jobs left for them”). A Baseline condition offered no explanation. We assessed children’s construal of category properties with three tasks: (1) “mutability” (measuring the belief that properties can change when a category member moves to a new environment) (2) “switched-at-birth” assessing property heritability; and (3) “skill learning” probing expectations about the relative ease for a social group member to master a new skill that is typical/atypical for their group.

Results and Discussion
Relative to Baseline and the Internalist-Essentialist framing, the Structural framing significantly increased judgments that category properties may change in a novel environment (p=.001) and trended towards suppressing expectations of heritability (p=.147; Figure 1). In contrast, the Internalist framing promoted beliefs in category members’ superior learning of category-stereotypical skills (p=.021) and showed a non-significant trend to suppress mutability. Critically, these effects did not differ for familiar vs. novel groups (interactions with familiarity: mutability p=.221; heritability p=.509; skill-learning p=.843), suggesting that the Structural framing effectively influenced representations of both familiar and unfamiliar social groups. Importantly, familiarity did have significant effects (Figure 2), suggesting that the absent interaction with framing didn't stem from an ineffective familiarity manipulation.

These findings show that structural framing of generics can effectively shape children’s beliefs about familiar and unfamiliar social groups, mitigating essentialist construals. We discuss the implications for how children form and revise social knowledge.

Authors

• Ny Vasil, California State University East Bay
  Presenting Author

• Tania Lombrozo, Princeton University

• Mahesh Srinivasan, University of California - Berkeley