The Development of Structural Thinking about Social Categories

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

One way children make sense of the social world is by forming mental representations of categories of people, such as "girls" and "boys" or "children" and "adults." Forming such categories is a useful way to summarize information and to support novel inferences. For instance, if you learn that a person belongs to the category "child," you can infer that the person is young. This work investigates what children's social categories look like, and how their categories affect the way they explain and reason about aspects of the social world. In particular, the experiments focus on whether and when children are able to appreciate that members of a social category can be associated with a property not only because of shared intrinsic characteristics or preferences, but also as a consequence of the larger social structure in which the category members are situated. For instance, girls could be associated with pink clothing because they have an intrinsic preference for pink, or instead because they are embedded in a social structure that increases the probability that they will select pink, perhaps due to external constraints such as availability and social acceptability. Reasoning about social categories in this way requires "structural thinking." The proposed work will chart the development and consequences of structural thinking from preschool through early childhood. Understanding the nature and development of social categories is important for a variety of reasons. At a theoretical level, structural thinking challenges dominant approaches to the representation of social categories, and therefore opens up new theoretical possibilities. At a practical level, understanding how children learn and reason about social categories is crucial for developing effective ways to mitigate the effects of harmful stereotypes, which could negatively affect not only a child's interactions with others, but also how the child thinks about him- or herself. More generally, structural thinking plays an important role in our ability to reason effectively about most complex systems: people embedded in social structures, individual species operating within ecosystems, or cities operating within state and federal guidelines, to name just a few. Understanding when and how structural thinking emerges can inform the development of educational efforts in childhood and support better decision-making in adulthood.