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

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

The sociocultural context in which a child lives influences their development of social cognition. This symposium features four papers investigating youth’s conceptions about prejudice and inequality in several contexts in Europe, Asia, and North America. The first paper reports on youth’s social cognition about exclusion of immigrants in the UK. It showed that, with age, inclusive and exclusive norms influenced whether British youth supported excluding immigrant peers and their perceptions of challengers of exclusion. The second and third papers discuss how youth perceive groups and social mobility in India and Nepal, both of which are societies with long histories of hierarchy and inequality. The second paper found that reframing general statements about groups (e.g., “women work as nurses”) as due to external, structural forces rather than inherent predispositions helped Indian children envision changes in categories that are real, familiar, and relevant to them: gender and caste. The third paper revealed that, over four timepoints, Nepalese adolescents increasingly expected high-status characters would achieve high-status jobs even as they became more optimistic over timepoints about low-status characters’ mobility. Finally, the fourth paper provided evidence for how children in two contexts allocate resources after witnessing the creation of bias-based inequalities. While youth from Maryland both rectified ethnically-biased inequalities and exhibited ingroup biases, children from Hawaiʻi remained impartial, revealing a more nuanced view of how youth respond to biases they observe. Together, these four papers reveal ways in which youth’s contexts may inform whether and when they recognize, reframe, and remediate prejudice and inequality.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Amanda Rose Burkholder, Furman University

Individual Presentations

• Peer Group Norms Affect Adolescents’ Bystander Social Cognitions - Presenting Author: Seçil Gönültaş, Bilkent University; Eirini Ketzitzidou Argyri, University Of Exeter; Sally Barbara Palmer, University Of Exeter; Luke McGuire, University Of Exeter; Melanie A. Killen, University of Maryland - College Park; Adam Rutland, University Of Exeter

• Can Structural Explanations Mitigate Essentialist Construals of Both Novel and Familiar Social Groups? - Presenting Author: Ny Vasil, California State University East Bay; Tania Lombrozo, Princeton University; Mahesh Srinivasan, University of California - Berkeley

• Adolescents’ Perceptions of Social Mobility in Relation to Their Career Aspirations: First Insights from Nepal - Presenting Author: Carmen Barth, University of Konstanz; Jeanine Grütter, University of Konstanz

• Children’s Decisions to Rectify Bias-Based Ethnic Inequalities: Evidence from Maryland and Hawaiʻi - Presenting Author: Amanda Rose Burkholder, Furman University; Elizabeth Brey, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Dylan Cooper, University of Maryland; Kristin J.M.B. Pauker, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Melanie A. Killen, University of Maryland - College Park