Whom to Trust and How to Share: Children and Adolescents’ Social Learning in Intergroup Contexts

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Every day, children and adolescents receive, seek, and transmit information about social groups, but little is known about the processes underlying epistemic trust in this area. Integrating work from within and outside the U.S., each speaker in this symposium will present novel empirical evidence about children’s and adolescents’ social learning about racial and religious groups. Interrogating U.S. White children’s tendency to trust ingroup over outgroup members, Paper 1 reveals that six year-olds, but not four year-olds, update their approaches to learn from prosocial and competent people regardless of their race. Highlighting youth as active in constructing their own knowledge, Paper 2 identifies changes between late childhood and early adolescence in beliefs about individual and structural causes of racial inequality in the U.S. and continuity in beliefs about parents as trustworthy sources of information about social inequality. Drawing on an RCT with U.S. White parents and young children, Paper 3 reports increases in parents’ self-efficacy to address racial biases but no corresponding changes in children’s attitudes, highlighting a need for future multi-level interventions. Investigating youth as both consumers and conveyers of biased information, Paper 4 illustrates how Catholic and Protestant adolescents in Northern Ireland shift their transmission of polarizing conflict-related information, but not neutral information, to peers, favoring their ingroup over multiple transmissions. The information that children and adolescents receive, seek, and transmit about social groups shapes their developing attitudes about those groups. These findings advance developmental scientists’ understanding of the social and cognitive processes underlying epistemic trust in intergroup contexts.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Ellen Kneeskern, University of Rochester

Individual Presentations

• Reducing Racial In-group Biases on White American Children: The Impact of Epistemic and Moral Behavior - Presenting Author: Pearl Han Li, Duke Univeristy; Charisse B. Pickron, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities; Melissa A. Koenig, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• “They’ll Tell the Truth”: Investigating Whom U.S. Youth Seek Out to Learn About Racial Inequality - Presenting Author: Ellen Kneeskern, University of Rochester; Laura Elenbaas, Purdue University, West Lafayette

• White Parents’ Influence on White Children’s Racial Biases: A Longitudinal Randomized Controlled Study - Presenting Author: Katharine Scott, Northwestern University; Nicole Huth, University of Wisconsin - Madison; Patricia G. Devine, University of Wissonsin; Kristin Shutts, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Poles Apart? Consumption and Transmission of Polarized Information Among Youth in a Divided Society - Presenting Author: Bethany Corbett, Queen’s University Belfast; Emma Flynn, Queen’s University Belfast; Lara Wood; Kathleen H. Corriveau, Boston University; Mariah Kornbluh, University of Oregon; Christin Scholz; Jennifer Watling Neal, Michigan State University; Jing Xu, University of Washington; Jocelyn B Dautel, Queen’s University Belfast