About this paper symposium

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Panel information
Panel 20. Social Cognition

Paper #1
Children’s and Adults’ Detection of Social Biases
Author information	Role
Wen Lu, Vanderbilt University, United States	Presenting author
Jonathan D. Lane, Vanderbilt University, United States	Non-presenting author
Nicolette Granata, Vanderbilt University, United States	Non-presenting author
Amber D. Williams, University of Washington, United States	Non-presenting author
Abstract
Introduction Biases against individuals who belong to or identify with certain social groups—including minority racial, ethnic, gender, and religious groups—pervade many societies. These biases may emerge in early childhood and may persist into later childhood and adulthood (e.g., Gibson et al., 2015; Perszyk et al., 2018; Raabe & Beelmann, 2011). Identifying biases in ourselves and others is a critical first step in addressing and, ultimately, overcoming their deleterious effects. In the current studies, we examined how the tendency to detect social biases in others develops. Methods A sample of 115 racially and ethnically diverse U.S. children (ages 4-10 years) and adults watched slideshows in which a protagonist routinely acted negatively towards people of one novel social group (e.g., Flurps) across six social interactions, while kindly interacting with folks from another novel social group (e.g., Zarpies) across six interactions. For example, a restaurant server kindly greets and takes orders from Zarpies, while routinely ignoring Flurps. After each negative behavior directed towards the target group, we asked participants to explain why the protagonist behaved that way. Bias coding. A coding system was developed to categorize participants’ responses, and inter-rater agreement was established. Of key interest was how frequently (across six trials) participants explained the protagonist’s behavior toward the novel group in terms of social bias (e.g., “She doesn’t like Flurp people”; “She likes Zarpies more than Flurps”). We also examine how quickly participants inferred that the protagonist was biased against the target group—the first trial (out of six) for which participants used this reasoning. Results & Conclusions Analyses were pre-registered: https://aspredicted.org/KSQ_ZHJ; https://aspredicted.org/KSQ_ZHJ. On average, children reasoned that the protagonist held a bias across 40% of scenarios; however, as depicted in Figure 1, this reasoning increased substantially with age (B = .14, t = 6.71, p < .001). In comparisons of younger children (n = 39, range: 4.28-6.75 years), older children (n = 40, range: 6.87-9.85 years), and adults (n = 36), we found that fewer than half of the youngest children (41%) ever inferred a bias at least once across the six trials, a rate significantly lower than that for older children (90%) and adults (100%); ꭓ2’s(1) > 20.00; p’s < .001. Participants who inferred a bias at least once typically did so quickly, as depicted in Figure 2. Among the participants who (at any point) reasoned that the protagonist was biased against the target group, most (89.8%) did so within just three social interactions, and more than half (56.8%) did so after just one social interaction. With increasing age, children observed fewer social interactions before reasoning that the protagonist was biased against the target group (β = .57, t = -6.12, p < .001). Findings indicate significant shifts in children’s detection of social bias between early and middle childhood. We will discuss the implications of these findings, and present preliminary findings of an experiment evaluating how children’s detection of bias varies based on whether they belong to the group that is discriminated against.

Paper #2
“Oh! Um. . . Sure”: Children use other’s linguistic surprisal to reason about social expectations and stereotypes
Author information	Role
Ben Morris, Yale University, United States	Presenting author
Alex Shaw, University of Chicago, United States	Non-presenting author
Abstract
Imagine a young boy expressing a gender counter-stereotypical preference (e.g., wanting a Barbie doll). His caregiver provides a permissive, gender egalitarian response; however, imagine that response comes slowly, with markers of surprise and production difficulty (e.g., saying “Oh! Um… Sure”). What message does that young boy really receive? Even ostensibly well-meaning messages from caregivers can have unintended consequences, with subtle linguistic cues inadvertently highlighting stereotype information (Rhodes et al., 2012; Chestnut et al., 2021). Across two pre-registered studies, we demonstrate how conversational surprisal cues can yield inferences about normative expectations. In Experiment 1 (N = 120, ages 4-9), we asked whether children use surprisal feedback to reason about gender stereotypes. In all conditions children see a boy request a toy and then heard feedback from an adult who always affirmed the character’s choice, but responded either fluently (fluent condition) or with markers of surprise and production difficulty (surprise condition; e.g., “Oh really? Um… Sure, honey. Uh… We can buy you that one”). Children were then asked to infer which toy the boy picked. In the fluent condition, children thought the boy picked in line with gender stereotypes (selecting the counter-stereotypical toy infrequently). Importantly, by age 6-to-7 children were sensitive to how the feedback was given, being more likely to infer the boy chose the counter-stereotypical toy in the surprise condition (38%) than the fluent condition (12%, p = 0.01). In Experiment 2 (n = 120, ages 4-9), we tested whether these cues are sufficient for children to learn a novel expectation about the behavior of an alien group. Children were introduced to three Hibble children wearing different color hats. An adult Hibble responded positively and easily as the first two Hibbles put their hats on (e.g., “Nice, you look great!”) and we manipulated their response to the third Hibble’s hat selection (the “target” hat). In the fluent baseline condition, participants heard fluent, affirming feedback. In the surprise condition, participants heard that same affirming feedback accompanied by surprisal cues (as in Study 1). Older children used conversational surprisal cues to infer that the wearing the target hat color is weirder, and children at all ages inferred that a Hibble who was teased was likely wearing the target hat color in the surprise condition. This second study suggests that others’ surprisal cues may not just lead children and adults to reason about extant expectations, but also to learn entirely new expectations. Across these experiments, we see consistent evidence that even well-intentioned feedback about a child’s behavior can nonetheless reveal one’s underlying expectations. Although the feedback was closely matched, the addition of conversational markers of surprise (interjection "Oh" and disfluencies "um") was sufficient to generate differentiated inferences. Our work highlights the importance of considering the ubiquitous (but oft overlooked) interactional bits of everyday language use; it is not just what we say, but how we say it that matters. Taken together, these studies suggest that conversational feedback may provide a crucial and unappreciated avenue for the transmission of social beliefs.

Paper #3
Of course he'd say that! Investigating children's reasoning about potentially biased claims about groups.
Author information	Role
Jenna Alton, University of Maryland College Park, United States	Presenting author
Hannah Keepers, University of Maryland College Park, United States	Non-presenting author
Lucas Payne Butler, University of Maryland College Park, United States	Non-presenting author
Abstract
To what extent do children understand that social relationships can influence their willingness to believe claims made about others? Some research shows that children are less likely to endorse claims that might be biased by social relationships like friends and enemies (Liberman & Shaw, 2020; Mills & Grant, 2009). However, how children think about this when reasoning about more nuanced social relationships (e.g., group membership), is an open question. The current study investigates children’s developing ability to incorporate the social group membership of a claim-maker into their reasoning about claims in a minimal group paradigm. 150 6- to 13-year-olds saw two novel minimal groups (Gorps and Flurps) who regularly compete against one another, and answered three interrelated questions: (1) whether they expect a character to say something “nice” or “not nice” about both the character’s in-group and out-group; (2) whether they would believe a claim (e.g., “Gorps are [not] very helpful”) more if it was delivered by a member of the group the claim is about (an in-group member), or someone from the other group (an out-group member); and (3) whether they would share that claim with a new kid in school--who did not belong to either group--both when the claim had been made by and about the claim-maker’s in-group and out-group. Children clearly expected someone to say something nice about their in-group, and something not nice about their out-group (b = 4.19, SE = 0.48, p < .001). Older children (as of approximately 10-years-old; Figure 1) said they would believe a negative claim more if it came from an in-group member, and a positive claim more if it came from an out-group member, while younger children showed the opposite pattern (b = -0.54, SE = 0.12, p < .001). Finally, children were more likely to share a positive claim than a negative claim (b = 0.44, SE = 0.4, p < .001), and were more likely to share positive claims from an out-group member than negative claims from an in-group member (b = 0.44, SE = 0.8, p < .001). Given older children’s use of group membership to modulate beliefs about claims, this suggests that children’s relative willingness to believe a claim influences their willingness to share it. However, an interaction with age suggests a more nuanced story (see Figure 2): older children only make this distinction for claims made by out-group members, and do not differentially share information based on its valence when the claim is made by in-group members (b = 0.17, SE = 0.03, p < .001). Older children seem to be uncertain about whether to share a claim when it is made by an in-group member, possibly because children recognize the claim-maker’s lack of objectivity, even when saying something negative about their own group. Taken together, these results highlight the complicated ways in which social group membership influences what we expect people to say, what we choose to believe, and our decisions about what information to pass on to others.

Paper #4
Understanding Children's Active Learning about Social Groups Through Their Question Asking about Identities and Inequalities
Author information	Role
Ellen Kneeskern, University of Rochester, United States	Presenting author
Nicole H. Park, University of Rochester, United States	Non-presenting author
Isobel A. Heck, University of Rochester, United States	Non-presenting author
Abstract
Research on the mechanisms underlying children’s learning about social groups has increasingly focused on parent-child conversations as an everyday context of learning. Yet, this literature has focused almost exclusively on what parents say to children and not on how children may themselves drive these conversations. Here, by examining the questions children ask about social group identities and inequalities, our goal is to introduce a child-centered lens into the active role children play in shaping their own learning about groups. Indeed, prior work has underscored question-asking as one of the most powerful learning tools available to children, allowing them to actively seek information, without waiting for others to offer that information up (Ronfard et al., 2017). In a pre-registered study conducted via Prolific, parents (N = 529, racially diverse (25% White), 59.6% women, Mincome = $55-75K) were asked to report questions their child(ren) (4- to 14-years) have asked about race/ethnicity, gender, and social class in general (identities condition), or about inequalities along these lines (inequalities condition). Each child question (N = 3,662) was coded along multiple dimensions, including (but not limited to) focus on the self (e.g., “Am I Black?”), others (“Are they a girl?”), or both (“Why is my friend brown and I am pink?”), and whether it referenced stereotypes (“Can boys wear pink?”) or discrimination (“Why do people think badly of the homeless?”). Parents also reported their responses, and for each topic, the frequency of conversations, who initiates them (parents or children), how qualified they feel, and how central that topic is to their own identity. Highlighting children as drivers of their own learning about social groups, parents reported that it is more often their children, rather than themselves, who initiate conversations, regardless of topic or condition. However, the more central a given topic was to parents’ own identity, the more likely they were to initiate conversations about it (Figure 1). These parents also reported having more frequent conversations about that topic (b = .19, SE = .04, p < .001) and feeling more qualified to answer their children’s questions about it (b = .13, SE = .04, p = .001). Overall, whereas younger children tended to ask questions about themselves, older children asked more questions about others (b = -.13, SE = .02, p < .001). With age, children also asked more questions about discrimination (Figure 2) and asked more race- and class-focused questions concerning stereotypes (race: b = .13, SE = .03, p < .001; class: b = .14, SE = .05, p = .006) – especially in the inequality condition. Further demonstrating how identities shape children’s question-asking, whereas non-White children across ages asked more race-based questions about themselves, White children asked more race questions about others (b = .93, SE = .29, p = .001). Analogous identity-based patterns were not present in children’s questions about gender or class. In ongoing analyses, we are using pattern-centered analyses to better understand profiles of question-asking within families. Together, this project provides a novel lens into parent-child conversations about social groups, offering insight into the information about social groups children are grappling with and trying to understand.

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