Examining the Influence of Generic Language on Children’s Attribution of a Mental Life

• In Event: 1-034 - How Do Social Groups Guide Children’s Sociomoral Reasoning?

Integrative Statement

Previous research suggests that social learning processes contribute to the development of intergroup bias (Over & McCall, 2018). Language is a particularly powerful social tool in the transmission of these attitudes, such that even subtle differences in expression can shape children’s perceptions of various social groups. For example, describing a social category in a generic way (e.g., “girls are bad at math”) supports the assumption that members share an innate quality or “essence” which is informative about their character traits (Gelman et al., 2004) and can have negative implications for children’s prosocial behavior (Rhodes & Mandalaywala, 2017). Using generic language to mark category boundaries – and thus emphasizing seemingly fundamental within-group similarities and between-group differences - could also license the belief that category members do not have individual identities. Since children associate their conceptions of a “mind” with individual identity (Corriveau et al., 2005), they may be less likely to consider the mental life of group members who have been described in generic terms.
Attributing fewer mental capabilities to others is an important facet of dehumanization and has consequences for moral judgements in adults (Waytz et al., 2010). Although recent evidence has demonstrated that children do reason about the mental and emotional capacities of social groups differently (McLoughlin & Over, 2018), little is known about the interplay between the cognitive biases and the cultural input which may contribute to these potentially dehumanizing beliefs. In the present study, we investigated whether hearing generic descriptions about a novel social group would influence the extent to which children reason about the mental life of individual group members. We speculated that more exposure to generic input would lead to the attribution of fewer mental states.
Five- to 10-year-old children were introduced to characters belonging to a novel social category (i.e., “Flurpies”). In one condition, children were told about this group using generic statements (e.g., “Flurpies wake up before the sun rises) whereas, in the other condition, these characters were described in specific terms (e.g., “This Flurpie wakes up before the sun rises”). Following this manipulation, participants were asked to rate the extent to which a Flurpie can experience different aspects of mental life (e.g., bodily sensations such as feeling sick or tired, emotions such as anger or pride, and cognitive abilities like remembering things) adapted from Weisman et al. (2017). Data collection is ongoing (current N = 27, 15 boys, Mage = 7;5) but results reveal that children in the generic condition believe that a Flurpie is less capable of these capacities compared to those in the specific language condition (Mgeneric = .74, M Specific = .85, t(25) = 2.33, p = .028). We plan to further examine whether these effects are driven by a particular component of mental life judgements (see Figure 1) and to investigate any possible interactions with age.
This research is important for understanding the cultural transmission of potentially dehumanizing social group perceptions, and thus for the developmental origins of intergroup morality.

Authors

• Niamh McLoughlin, Boston University
  Presenting Author

• Telli Davoodi, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Eleanor Castine, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kathleen Helen Corriveau, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author