About this session

Saturday, 10:20 AM - 11:50 AM

Is What I See and Hear Right? Children's Learning About Groups Through Observation and Conversation

Children receive information about social groups every day, but how exactly do they interpret this information? Examining this process from early childhood to adolescence, the four talks in this symposium present novel empirical evidence on how children interpret observations, evaluate claims, and seek further information about social groups.

Investigating how observations of intergroup interactions teach children about social group-based biases, Paper 1 reveals that 4- to- 10-year-old children’s tendency to detect bias increased across childhood, and by age 7, many children inferred a group bias after observing only one or two negative interactions between two groups.

Highlighting how subtle features of linguistic feedback like conversational surprise can indicate group norms to children, Paper 2 (4- to 9-year-olds) finds that by age 6, verbal surprise feedback alone cues children to how people think groups should act, inadvertently passing on group-based stereotypes and expectations.

Interrogating whether children understand that group membership can bias speakers’ group-based claims, Paper 3 uncovers that though children across ages 6 to 13 expect people to say positive things about their ingroup and negative things about their outgroup, only older children (10+ years) used those expectations to evaluate the truthfulness of claims and decide whether to share them.

Lastly, underscoring children’s own role in their learning about social groups, Paper 4 finds that parents of 4-to-14-year-old children report that it is more often children, rather than parents, who initiate conversations about social group identities and inequalities, and that children actively seek information about social groups via question asking.

Paper #1
Title	Children’s and Adults’ Detection of Social Biases
Presenting author	Wen Lu, Vanderbilt University, United States

Paper #2
Title	“Oh! Um. . . Sure”: Children use other’s linguistic surprisal to reason about social expectations and stereotypes
Presenting author	Ben Morris, Yale University, United States

Paper #3
Title	Of course he'd say that! Investigating children's reasoning about potentially biased claims about groups.
Presenting author	Jenna Alton, University of Maryland College Park, United States

Paper #4
Title	Understanding Children's Active Learning about Social Groups Through Their Question Asking about Identities and Inequalities
Presenting author	Ellen Kneeskern, University of Rochester, United States

View all paper details

Session chairs
Ellen Kneeskern, University of Rochester, United States; Dr. Isobel Heck, , United States

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