RUI: Mechanisms Underlying the Development of Social Categorization

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Children divide the world into groups in various ways, including race and gender. The way children represent these groups in their minds often serves as the basis for negative outcomes such as stereotyping and biased behavior. However, the people children interact with do not belong to only one group; they are simultaneously part of multiple groups.

This perspective is not often recognized, and even more rarely adopted in prior research. Recognizing and incorporating this perspective in research is important because it illuminates unique forms of bias faced by people who have multiple marginalized identities. This project will investigate how children integrate information about multiple groups and how the processes underlying that integration may differ across early childhood.

Specifically, the project will examine how low-level perceptual cues (e.g., facial femininity) and higher-level conceptual knowledge (e.g., beliefs about the category) shape how children integrate information about multiple categories in their representations of others. Investigating these processes is critical in order to develop a framework for predicting at what ages different types of interventions to pre-empt bias might be most effective.

The project tests the hypothesis that perceptual cues (e.g., facial features) are more influential in shaping categorization processes for younger, preschool-aged children, but that conceptual knowledge about groups is more influential for older children. The project uses novel adaptations of social-cognitive methods used with adult samples for use with children.

Children will be shown pictures of people’s faces that differ in gender and racial background and asked to make a gender categorization. This project will help spur theoretical innovations about how children parse the social world, as well as create pipelines for research dissemination and community involvement via partnerships with community-based institutions.

The project will also provide training in social psychology and developmental science for a diverse group of undergraduate researchers.

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.