About this poster

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Panel information
Panel 8. Social Intergroup Processes

Abstract

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To remedy inequities in society we must document and communicate that disparities exist. From governmental reports to everyday speech, patterns of oppression are often summarized with generic generalizations: “Latinx students underachieve in academia”; “women of color have trouble getting tenure in STEM”, etc. But recent research finds that such generic language can foster bias and prejudice, by promoting stereotyping and “essentialist” beliefs that group members’ aptitudes and life outcomes are fixed by inherent “group nature”, and that not much can or should be done about it (Hammond & Cimpian, 2017; Diesendruck, 2021; Gelman, 2003; Haslam et al., 2000; Roberts et al., 2017; Hetey & Eberhardt, 2014). Such inferences sustain and exacerbate achievement barriers for underrepresented groups, perpetuating status quo and stifling social change. Importantly, generics figure prominently in children’s input, who rely heavily on learned generalization to navigate the world (Rhodes et al., 2012). This is troubling for society, developmental scientists and social justice advocates alike.
Can adults acknowledge that some descriptions of social groups are socially contingent generalizations, attributing characteristics that would disappear in a better society? And can young children distinguish generics that describe universal regularities that hold broadly across contexts (“cows moo”) from those that convey narrow, context-dependent regularities specific to a society or time period: e.g., “teachers wear masks” (during the pandemic); “police stop Black people more” (in a community with high racial profiling rates)?
To begin addressing these questions, we conducted two interdisciplinary studies (bridging cognitive developmental psychology, linguistics and philosophy) to assess the developing capacity for contextual restriction, or narrowing the reference of a generic claim to a regularity that holds within a sociocultural “bubble”. Participants (Study 1: 159 adults, Mage = 35yrs, 93 women, 61 men, 5 nonbinary/other; Study 2: 45 4-7-year-old children, Mage = 5.74yrs, 22 females, 20 males, 3 nonbinary/other; data collection ongoing) learned about characteristics of novel social groups. Some characteristics were confined to a narrow socio-geographic “bubble” of an island (“local”; a proxy for contingent regularities, such as racial achievement gaps, restricted to a specific society). Other characteristics were prevalent among group members around the world (“global”). We assessed participants’ intuitions about generics attributing local and global characteristics to the group (e.g., “Sapers braid/shave their hair”). Most importantly, we manipulated context cues, signaling either that the speaker was talking about the world in general (unrestricted context) or about the island (restricted context).
Three novel findings emerged. First, adults endorsed generics attributing context-contingent properties to social groups, as long as they received clear cues narrowing down the speech context (p<.001; Figure 1). Thus, adults use generics in two very different ways: for general claims, and to convey associations that hold in “sociocultural bubbles”. Second, older children’s responses mirrored adults’ pattern, p<.001, albeit in a weaker form. This is good news, indicating a developing capacity to appreciate different uses of generics in speech, to convey either unrestricted or context-specific regularities. Finally, while younger children showed a nascent appreciation of speech context, they over-attributed socially-contingent, local properties to the group outside of a restricted context, on par with global properties (p=.421). Such undifferentiated use of generics in younger age suggests a troubling discrepancy between children and adults’ default assumptions about generic meanings and capacity for contextual restriction, opening doors for miscommunications between adults (teachers, parents) and children (learners). Adults could unwittingly instill problematic, essentialist beliefs in a child, even while attempting to convey the opposite: highlighting problematic patterns with the hope of promoting social change may be perceived by children as claims about a group’s unalterable attributes. We discuss ways to mitigate this, recommendations for communication in classroom and family contexts, and policy implications.

Author information

Author	Role
Sabria Hinton, California State University East Bay	Presenting author
Virginia Valerio-Lambert, California State University East Bay, United States	Non-presenting author
Danisha Watson, California State University East Bay, United States	Non-presenting author
Justin Miranda, California State University East Bay, United States	Non-presenting author
Jocelyn Celaya, California State University East Bay, United States	Non-presenting author
Katherine Ritchie, University of California Irvine, United States	Non-presenting author
Ny Vasil, California State University East Bay, United States	Non-presenting author

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