CAREER: SBP: Understanding how diversity exposure impacts social categorization

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

It is often not feasible to have interactions with people from all groups. Past research has shown that interactions with someone from an unfamiliar group changes attitudes towards other members of that group. But most communities do not have people from every background. This project develops a new idea: that exposure to a variety of people more broadly (rather than to a specific group) may change how people think about and process information. This idea is tested by developing new measures, for example to measure linguistic variability of infants’ and children’s neighborhoods and networks. The project develops novel measures of exposure to variability, based on the principle of entropy: networks that contain a greater number of groups are scored as having more variability. By pairing this novel measure with validated measures of children’s social cognition, the research will test whether children who are exposed to a greater variety of people show differences in processing of (social) information. This approach will help address a number of fundamental questions including how children's own social networks and neighborhoods influence their developing cognition. The broad aim is to better understand how early exposure to variability is related to social cognitive processes in infants and children. The laboratory-based research is a critical first step that can be leveraged for future work that translates the findings into resources. The project also provides training in psychology and developmental science for the next generation of researchers, and supports partnerships between the university and local museums aimed at increasing scientific literacy. 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.