CAREER: SBP: Understanding how diversity exposure impacts social categorization

People divide the social world into groups, based on attributes such as race, gender, and nationality. Beginning early in life, people use information about another person’s groups to form expectations about that person’s likely traits and behaviors. Even infants expect people in the same group to be similar.

Expecting people within a group to be similar may lay the foundation for negative stereotypes and bias. One potential way to reduce bias is through positive interactions. Past research has shown that positive interactions with someone from an unfamiliar group improves attitudes towards other members of that group.

But most communities do not include representation of people from every background. As a result, it is not feasible to have positive interactions with people from all groups. This project develops a new idea: that exposure to diversity more broadly (rather than to a specific group) may itself reduce stereotyping.

This idea is tested by developing measures of the racial and linguistic diversity of infants’ and children’s neighborhoods and networks along with traditional measures of stereotyping.

The project develops novel measures of exposure to diversity, based on the principle of entropy: networks that contain a greater number of groups and with more equal representation of groups are scored as more diverse. By pairing this novel measure with other validated measures of children’s stereotyping, the research will test whether differences in exposure to diversity are related to differences in stereotyping.

This approach helps to address a number of fundamental questions. One is whether exposure to racial diversity reduces race-based stereotyping. Another is whether the effects of diversity exposure are even broader, such that exposure to linguistic diversity can reduce race-based stereotyping.

A third is how children’s stereotyping based on racial groups compares to linguistic groups. The broad aim is to better understand how early exposure to diversity is related to stereotyping in infants and children. The laboratory-based research is a critical first step that can be leveraged for future interventions aimed at mitigating the negative impacts of stereotyping.

The project also provides training in social psychology and developmental science for a diverse group of early-career researchers, and supports partnerships between the university and local museums aimed at increasing scientific literacy.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.