Names will never hurt me? Naming and the development of racial and gender categories in preschool‐aged children

Abstract

For children as well as adults, object categories (e.g., dog, animal, car, vehicle) serve as a rich base for inductive inferences. Here, we examine children's inferences regarding categories of people. We showed 4-year-old children a picture of an individual (e.g., a white woman), taught them a novel property of the individual (e.g., is good at a new game called zaggit), and examined children's projections of that property to other individuals. Experiment 1 revealed that children used the broad category person as an inductive base: they extended the novel property to other people, regardless of their race or gender, but not to non-human animals or artifacts. However, naming prompted children to use more specific social categories as an inductive base. When the target individual was identified as a member of a named, novel social category, children were more likely to extend the property to members of the same race-based (Experiment 2) or genderbased (Experiment 3) category as the target. Implications of naming in children's formation of social categories based on race or gender are discussed, and the consequences on the emergence of stereotypes are considered.

Priorities in social categories

“…Nonetheless, verbal labeling has noteworthy consequences for social categorization as well. Children make more inductive inferences based on gender and racial categories when they are provided with a novel label for those categories, than when the categories are visually depicted yet unlabeled (Waxman, 2010); similarly, categories that are visually marked (e.g., t-shirt color), but not functionally used, do not foster robust ingroup social preferences in children (Bigler et al, 1997).…”

Infants possess an abstract expectation of ingroup support

“…Across experiments, we manipulated whether the two women belonged to the same minimal group, to different minimal groups, or to unspecified groups (i.e., no information was provided about their group affiliations). When marked, group affiliations were established via novel labels, as in prior studies with infants and young children (11,21,33,34). We reasoned that if an abstract expectation of ingroup support is already present by 17 mo of age, then infants should detect a violation in the ignore event when the women belonged to the same group and hence were expected to help one another.…”

Cultural transmission of social essentialism

“…Psychological essentialism is a pervasive cognitive bias that leads people to view members of a category as sharing a deep, underlying, inherent nature (a category "essence"), which causes them to be fundamentally similar to one another in both obvious and nonobvious ways (2,3). Numerous previous studies have documented essentialist beliefs about social categories (e.g., gender, race) from the preschool years through adulthood (4)(5)(6)(7)(8); however, to date no research has examined the processes underlying the development of these beliefs. The question of how "a belief in essence" develops was the focus of our present studies.…”

“…First, essentialist beliefs about both biological and social categories have been found early in development (by age 4 y) in every cultural context studied to date, including in both rural and urban communities within the United States (4,5,7,19), among Jewish and Arab children in Israel (8,(20)(21)(22), in a small fishing community in Madagascar (6), and among children in Brazil (23). However, whereas young children show essentialist beliefs about all basic animal categories (e.g., tigers, robins, lizards), they hold essentialist beliefs about only a small subset of the social categories with which they are familiar.…”