The Impact of Children’s Race on 5- to 7-year-olds’ Inductive Reasoning About Social Categories

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

Children and adults use social-category membership to make inductive inferences about an individual’s properties and behaviors. Some evidence suggests both between- and within-culture differences in which social categories are imbued with inductive potential. For instance, children in Israel focus on ethnicity when making inductive inferences (Birnbaum et al., 2010), whereas children in Northern Ireland focus on religion (Smyth et al., 2017). However, the tendency to make inferences based on ethnicity is diminished in Israeli children who attend ethnically integrated schools, especially for children in the ethnic majority (Deeb et al., 2011).

These findings point to the importance of investigating children’s social-category based reasoning in diverse samples and a range of cultural contexts. Yet most studies that have investigated the inductive potential of social categories in the US have focused on upper-middle class, White urban samples (Shutts et al., 2013; Smyth et al., 2017). The present study sought to address this gap in the literature by investigating the inductive potential of three social categories – ethnicity (Hispanic/Non-Hispanic), religion (Jewish/Christian), and gender – in a diverse group of children from the San Joaquin Valley, a rural, agricultural region with high levels of cultural, ethnic, and economic diversity.

Participants were 82 5- to 7-year-olds (M = 77 months) from diverse backgrounds (Table 1). Children participated in a forced-choice inference task adapted from Birnbaum et al. (2010) in which they saw 12 triads of pictures of children. Each triad consisted of two exemplars from two different social categories and a target character that belonged to one of the same social categories as each exemplar (Figure 1). For each exemplar, an experimenter labeled its social categories and provided a novel fact. She then introduced the target character, noted its social categories, and asked the child which exemplar the target would share characteristics with. Children saw each social comparison (ethnicity/gender, gender/religion, ethnicity/religion) four times.

Results indicated that responses differed based on children’s race. Chi-square analyses revealed that White children picked the gender match significantly more often than expected by chance on both gender/ethnicity trials, χ2(4) = 18.14, p = .001, and gender/religion trials, χ2(4) = 12.53, p = .014, and they picked the ethnicity match significantly more often than expected by chance on the ethnicity/religion trials, χ2(4) = 9.52, p = .049. In contrast, racial minority children only selected gender marginally more often than chance on the gender/ethnicity trials, χ2(4) = 8.55, p = .073, and their distribution of responses did not differ from chance on the gender/religion and ethnicity/religion trials, suggesting they picked these categories equally.

Thus, White children were highly likely to make inductive inferences based on gender, consistent with prior literature suggesting that children essentialize gender from an early age. White children also made inductive inferences based on ethnicity, although it seems they imbue ethnicity with less inductive potential than gender. Children from diverse racial backgrounds did not show either of these inferential patterns. This suggests that children from different racial backgrounds may have differing experiences that contribute to differences in reasoning about social categories.

Authors

• Megan Pronovost, California State University - Fresno
  Presenting Author

• Rose M Scott, University of California - Merced
  Non-Presenting Author