1-178 - Including transgender, multiracial, and multifaceted identities will improve developmental science

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Developmental research on children’s social concepts focuses primarily on children from discrete social categories (e.g., “boy” versus “girl” and “black” versus “white”). Important theories emerge from this work, but we know far less about how these theories apply to children from non-discrete categories. For instance, cognitive development theories posit that children quickly learn that gender is constant (Kohlberg, 1966), but transgender children—who do not identify with their biological sex—may reason that gender is rather flexible. Similarly, theories of racial categorization argue that children represent “white” and “black” as separate (Aboud, 1988), but multiracial children may reason that an individual can be both black and white. Furthermore, although everyone has multiple identities (e.g., being white and a girl), research has centered on singular identity frameworks, meaning we know little about how a multifaceted mindset shapes social perception.

This symposium highlights research that focuses on non-discrete identities, which is important for developing more inclusive theories of development. The first presenter will demonstrate how transgender children’s concepts of gender stability differ from gender ‘typical’ children. The second presenter will show that multiracial children are not only perceived differently than monoracial children, but that those perceptions also vary between multiracial and monoracial samples. The third presenter will demonstrate how a multiple-identity mindset increases flexible thinking in both social and non-social domains. Finally, the discussant (an expert on children’s conceptual development and social cognition) will discuss the impacts of this work on developing a more inclusive developmental science.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Steven Othello Roberts, University of Michigan

Discussant

• Yarrow Dunham, yarrow.dunham@yale.edu

Individual Presentations

• Transgender Children’s Beliefs about Gender Stability - Presenting Author: Anne A Fast, University of Washington; Kristina Olson, University of Washington

• Multiracial Person Perception: Multiracial Children as Targets and as Participants - Presenting Author: Steven Othello Roberts, University of Michigan; Susan A Gelman, University of Michigan; Amber D. Williams, University of Texas at Austin; Arnold K Ho, University of Michigan; Rebecca Strauss, University of Michigan

• Multiple-Identity Mindsets Shift Flexible Thinking and Social Categorizations - Presenting Author: Sarah Gaither, Duke University; Fan Samantha, University of Chicago; Katherine Kinzler, Cornell University