Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: Examining the Statistics of Children's Social World

This award was provided as part of the NSF Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF), Sociology, and Law and Science programs. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research.

NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields.

Under the sponsorship of Dr. Marjorie Rhodes at New York University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating children’s stereotyping. This project seeks to understand how children develop stereotypes about social groups, such as racial and gender groups, and how to disrupt such stereotypes.

Specifically, this project investigates the idea that children could naturally develop stereotypes from growing up in social environments that, due to structural biases, do not present representative information about social groups. This project examines whether children might develop stereotypes from misrepresentations in who they do (and do not) see, and whether these stereotypes could be prevented if children are informed about the structural biases that affect who they see.

This project will advance our understanding of how children develop stereotypes by examining how stereotypes might originate in the social structure of children’s early social experiences and contribute to our understanding of how to prevent such stereotypes from developing in the first place.

This project aims to identify how statistical reasoning might contribute to—and could be used to combat—the development of social stereotypes in early childhood. Here, we identify a potential novel source of stereotypes in children’s social environments: social structures (e.g., segregation, information bubbles, media biases) that skew who children see and meet, causing children to be exposed to a sample of group members that is not representative of social group populations as a whole.

The proposed project will leverage experimental and computational methods to address whether children can identify skew in the information about group members that they observe, adjust their beliefs about groups accordingly, and recruit these mechanisms in real-world skewed social environments. Together, these studies will identify how children might develop stereotypes in skewed social environments, and how children’s reasoning might be harnessed to prevent the development of stereotypes.

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.