028: How do children form social groups?
6th March 2017 • Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive • Jen Lumanlan
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00:42:02
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This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting. Click here to view all the items in this series.
How social groups are formed has profound implications for what we teach our children about our culture. Professor Yarrow Dunham of Yale University tells us how we all group people in our heads according to criteria that we think are important – in many cases it’s a valuable tool that allows us to focus our mental energy. But when we look at ideas like race and gender, we see that we tend to classify people into these groups based on criteria that may not actually be useful at all. This episode will shed further light on Episode 6, “Wait, is my toddler racist?” and will lay the groundwork for us to study groupings based on gender in an upcoming episode. References Baron, A.S. & Dunham, Y. (2015). Representing “Us” and “Them”: Building blocks of intergroup cognition. Journal of Cognition and Development 16(5), 780-801. DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2014.1000459
Baron, A.S., Dunham, Y., Banaji, M., & Carey, S. (2014). Constraints on the acquisition of social category concepts. Journal of Cognition and Development 15(2), 238-268. DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2012.742902
Dunham, Y., Baron, A.S., & Carey, S. (2011). Consequences of “minimal” group affiliations in children. Child Development 82(3), 793-811. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01577.x
Dunham, Y., Chen, E.E., & Banaji, M.R. (2013). Two signatures of implicit intergroup attitudes: Developmental invariance and early enculturation. Psychological Science Online First. DOI: 10.1177/0956797612463081
Dunham, Y., Stepanova, E.V., Dotsch, R., & Todorov, A. (2015). The development of race-based perceptual categorization: Skin color dominates early category judgments. Developmental Science 18(3), 469-483. DOI: 10.1111/desc.12228
Rhodes, M., Leslie, S-J, Saunders, K., Dunham, Y., & Cimpian, A. (In Press). How does social essentialism affect the development of inter-group relations? Developmental Science. Retrieved from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306482087_How_does_social_essentialism_affect_the_development_of_inter-group_relations
Richter, N., Over, H., & Dunham, Y. (2016). The effects of minimal group membership on young preschoolers’ social preferences, estimates of similarity, and behavioral attribution. Collabra 2(1), p.1-8. DOI: : 10.1525/collabra.44 [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Transcript Jen: [00:30] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We’ve already talked quite a bit about the development of racism on Your Parenting Mojo and if you missed it, you might want to go back to episode six, which was called Wait, Is My Toddler Racist, and in that episode we talked about some of the unconscious psychological processes that are at work in all of us that can lead our children to develop racist attitudes and we learned that some of the concepts we might hold to be true if we hadn’t specifically learned about them – things like the fact that children just don’t notice racial differences unless they’re pointed out and the children won’t become racist if they aren’t explicitly taught to be – really aren’t true at all. Today I’m joined by an expert in social group formation who’s going to help us to understand how social groups form and specifically how we formulate our ideas about racial groups and will give us some practical tools we can use in our attempts to raise children who aren’t racist. Yarrow Dunham is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. He received his doctorate in education and also his masters from Harvard University and his BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Dunham leads the Social Cognitive Development Lab at Yale where he and his colleagues look for answers to questions about how and why we affiliate with social groups, how we evaluate those groups, and how the concept of fairness develops in children and how all of this varies across cultures. Welcome Professor Dunham. Dr. Dunham: [01:49] Thank you. Great to be here. Jen: [01:50] All right, so let’s dive in. Can you tell us what is psychological essentialism and why it’s so important to our work? Dr. Dunham: [01:58] So psychological essentialism is the view that differences between people are based in deep internal property is probably the easiest way to think about them. In the modern view is something like genes, so what makes to people different or two groups of people different is that something inside of them is different and a key part of this idea is we think those differences are there in that essence is there, even if we can’t see it, so that creates situation in which I can get it wrong about what group. You’re right, I can think you’re in one group based on say the way you look, but I can find out something. Say something about your essence, something about your genes or maybe your ancestry that will lead me to overrule my initial idea and say that I got it wrong. So really at the end of the day of essentialism is that view that group differences are based in sort of natural and deep differences within people. Jen: [02:48] And that came up, I think in our previous episode on racism. It’s the idea that we all kind of form these ideas about people based on perhaps a split second view of, of what we see of them. Is that right? Dr. Dunham: [03:01] Yes, that’s right. So we can form categories of people very quickly, we can decide that someone belongs to, in particular, certain categories, what we might think of as the most salient ways in which we group people, things like age, gender, race, these things tend to come to mind quite quickly. And even as you talked about in that last episode, even kind of automatically, in terms of as soon as we encounter someone even for the first time Jen: [03:25] And is it right that it’s kind of a survival mechanism that we, we wouldn’t physically be able to process the information that we needed to process. If I looked at you and try to think about who you are on an individual trade by trade basis, I wouldn’t also be able to conduct this conversation with you. Dr. Dunham: [03:41] I mean at least it would certainly be much more difficult. And the way I think about it as categories of people are really just one kind of category and we have categories of all kinds of other things. We have categories of objects in the room, you know, tables and chairs, and we have categories of animals and plants and in all of those domains, these are really, really useful. These really simplify the job of thinking about the world. You know, if you tell me there’s a chair in the other room, I don’t have to think that hard about what the thing is like that you have in the other room and I can occasionally be surprised if it’s, you know, some fun midcentury modern thing, but I have a pretty clear idea of what’s going to be in the other room and what it’s going to be good for – sitting on say. And that’s super useful and this is true for people as well and in many domains it doesn’t bother us at all and needn’t, right? when you will go see a dentist. We have a lot of ideas about what skills this dentist ought to have and how we’re going to interact with that dentist. And that’s, as you’re pointing out, immensely useful and just kind of smoothing the interactions we have. I don’t have to go in there wondering how it all works. Right. I have a lot of prior knowledge I can draw on. Jen: [04:41] All right, so since we’re talking about, you know, what are some different social groups, tell us about who were the Zarpies and who were the Gorps and what did you find children’s relationships with Zarpies and Gorps? Dr. Dunham: [04:52] So both my lab and some of my collaborators and some of this research was in collaboration with a bunch of other people, but I’ll just mention Marjorie Rhoads, a professor at NYU who has done a lot of work in the same vein and those are basically Zarpies and Gorps – those are just nonsense labels that we use to introduce children to some brand new social group that we, the researchers have made up. The reason we do this is while we do a lot of research on groups like race or gender, it gets a lot more complicated because different kids have such a different range of background experiences. They may have learned different things, experienced different things and so there’s just a lot more variability and what kids might think about those groups. But if we use these groups that we’ve created, like as Zarpie, we know that what kids know about it is absolutely nothing right when they come into our lab, they had no prior knowledge because we made them up and that way we can get a clearer view of children’s more intuitive or natural ways of thinking about groups when you pull out or abstract away from prior knowledge. Dr. Dunham: [05:50] So that’s a little background for why we might use these kinds of funny sounding groups that are just designed to be intriguing to children. Right. And kind of fun sounding to children. And in the research that we did, basically we introduced children to a group like the Zarpies and in one case we induced them to essentialize the group. In other words, to think about the Zarpies as really being something deep and important about who you are. And another case we didn’t. We didn’t lead them to think about Zarpies and such and such an essentialized manner. And then we asked, did this manipulation – did the extent to which we lead kids to be centralized. The group change how they felt about the group that if for example, lead them to dislike the group more or to share less resources, less of the child’s own resources with them, and we did this because there’s been a long standing series of arguments about the relationship between essentialism and prejudice with a lot of people, assuming that essentialism will lead to prejudice, that if you essentially as a group, you’re more likely to consider it to be prejudice towards that group and maybe not to go on for too long, but just to motivate that intuition, why might we think that if you think groups are really, really deeply important and based on internal properties of of the people and you had learned that a group has some bad property. Dr. Dunham: [07:07] Maybe take an example with gender. Let’s say you hold a stereotype that boys are better at math than girls. If you essentialize that category, you’re very likely to think, well, that must be something about the nature of boys and girls. That’s what it’s like to be a boys, is to be better at math, to be a girl is to be worse at math. In fact, in that case we think that’s probably not true. It’s probably much more likely that it’s cultural factors, but the danger of essential, as I think comes out pretty clearly here, if you essentialize the group and you now know that the groups differ in some way, you’re likely to think that that difference is very deep and kind of natural rather than cultural or environmental. So this is what we wanted to test in a more experimental fashion with the Zarpies. And what we found is it actually didn’t in our study, lead to more prejudice. So kids were actually pretty positive about these cartoonish Zarpies that we introduced them to. However it did lead them to not be as willing to share with them to be in some sense less generous when they were sharing resources with the Zarpies. Jen: [08:06] And this is when they are a member of the Zarpie group or when they are a member of the Gorp group? Dr. Dunham: [08:10] So in this one, children are not actually members of either groups or just learning about this as another group, but in that sense the Zarpies are kind of an outgroup as a group to which they do not belong and this was a little bit surprising to us. So we sort of replicated it a few times to make sure we really had it right. But what we think is going on now as if you think about it a little more, there can be a really good or really bad or really positive or really negative group that you might have essentialize. So there’s not a necessary connection. We think now between sort of valence like how good or bad the group is and whether you essentially it, but we think that essentialism essentially maybe a bad choice of words, but essentialism leads us to really think of the boundary between groups as very rigid and strong. And when you do, it seems that kids elect to not share as much as they think about that group is really distinct and different from them. They think, well, I’ll keep my resources to myself rather than sharing, but they don’t necessarily think the group is bad. Jen: [09:07] Okay, alright. And then didn’t you do a follow up experiment where you made the children a part of the Zarpie group and tell them that they were also Zarpies. Dr. Dunham: [09:16] So we’ve done studies a lot like this. Not always using things like Gorps and Zarpies; sometimes just using something even simpler like a blue group and a red group. And in these kinds of studies we and lots of people have done these studies now with children going all the way down to about age three. And so for example, in some of the studies I’ve done in this line, if you simply tell a child you’re going to be in the red group, why don’t you put on this red shirt so you really remember which group you’re going to be in. We find that actually that in and of itself is enough to get kids to like their own group more. So that’s enough to get kids to think. Yeah, the red group seems like it’s probably better. And also to even be willing to share more with members of their own group and so on. Jen: [09:55] Yeah. I’ve noticed that this phenomenon is alive and well in adults as well. Dr. Dunham: [10:00] Absolutely. Jen: [10:01] Yeah. I remember sitting in a. I actually went to Yale for my first masters and I did some classes in the business school and I remember one of the professors saying, you know, you guys are all here; you’ve come from disparate walks of life. You don’t have very much in common. I mean obviously in business school you do have some things in common, but you are going to be enticed to think of each other as a sort of a cohesive unit and do favors for each other and help each other get ahead in your careers based on the fact that you’re all sitting together in the classroom, which really to a large extent is pretty arbitrary. Dr. Dunham: [10:35] Yeah, absolutely. I think this is an immensely important point. Thinking about how humans, reason about groups and even about the development of racism, because what it says is we’re really flexible in what groups we decide to care about or affiliate with and we’re not just flexible. Some of them are essentially things that...
How social groups are formed has profound implications for what we teach our children about our culture. Professor Yarrow Dunham of Yale University tells us how we all group people in our heads according to criteria that we think are important – in many cases it’s a valuable tool that allows us to focus our mental energy. But when we look at ideas like race and gender, we see that we tend to classify people into these groups based on criteria that may not actually be useful at all. This episode will shed further light on Episode 6, “Wait, is my toddler racist?” and will lay the groundwork for us to study groupings based on gender in an upcoming episode. References Baron, A.S. & Dunham, Y. (2015). Representing “Us” and “Them”: Building blocks of intergroup cognition. Journal of Cognition and Development 16(5), 780-801. DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2014.1000459
Baron, A.S., Dunham, Y., Banaji, M., & Carey, S. (2014). Constraints on the acquisition of social category concepts. Journal of Cognition and Development 15(2), 238-268. DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2012.742902
Dunham, Y., Baron, A.S., & Carey, S. (2011). Consequences of “minimal” group affiliations in children. Child Development 82(3), 793-811. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01577.x
Dunham, Y., Chen, E.E., & Banaji, M.R. (2013). Two signatures of implicit intergroup attitudes: Developmental invariance and early enculturation. Psychological Science Online First. DOI: 10.1177/0956797612463081
Dunham, Y., Stepanova, E.V., Dotsch, R., & Todorov, A. (2015). The development of race-based perceptual categorization: Skin color dominates early category judgments. Developmental Science 18(3), 469-483. DOI: 10.1111/desc.12228
Rhodes, M., Leslie, S-J, Saunders, K., Dunham, Y., & Cimpian, A. (In Press). How does social essentialism affect the development of inter-group relations? Developmental Science. Retrieved from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306482087_How_does_social_essentialism_affect_the_development_of_inter-group_relations
Richter, N., Over, H., & Dunham, Y. (2016). The effects of minimal group membership on young preschoolers’ social preferences, estimates of similarity, and behavioral attribution. Collabra 2(1), p.1-8. DOI: : 10.1525/collabra.44 [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Transcript Jen: [00:30] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We’ve already talked quite a bit about the development of racism on Your Parenting Mojo and if you missed it, you might want to go back to episode six, which was called Wait, Is My Toddler Racist, and in that episode we talked about some of the unconscious psychological processes that are at work in all of us that can lead our children to develop racist attitudes and we learned that some of the concepts we might hold to be true if we hadn’t specifically learned about them – things like the fact that children just don’t notice racial differences unless they’re pointed out and the children won’t become racist if they aren’t explicitly taught to be – really aren’t true at all. Today I’m joined by an expert in social group formation who’s going to help us to understand how social groups form and specifically how we formulate our ideas about racial groups and will give us some practical tools we can use in our attempts to raise children who aren’t racist. Yarrow Dunham is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. He received his doctorate in education and also his masters from Harvard University and his BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Dunham leads the Social Cognitive Development Lab at Yale where he and his colleagues look for answers to questions about how and why we affiliate with social groups, how we evaluate those groups, and how the concept of fairness develops in children and how all of this varies across cultures. Welcome Professor Dunham. Dr. Dunham: [01:49] Thank you. Great to be here. Jen: [01:50] All right, so let’s dive in. Can you tell us what is psychological essentialism and why it’s so important to our work? Dr. Dunham: [01:58] So psychological essentialism is the view that differences between people are based in deep internal property is probably the easiest way to think about them. In the modern view is something like genes, so what makes to people different or two groups of people different is that something inside of them is different and a key part of this idea is we think those differences are there in that essence is there, even if we can’t see it, so that creates situation in which I can get it wrong about what group. You’re right, I can think you’re in one group based on say the way you look, but I can find out something. Say something about your essence, something about your genes or maybe your ancestry that will lead me to overrule my initial idea and say that I got it wrong. So really at the end of the day of essentialism is that view that group differences are based in sort of natural and deep differences within people. Jen: [02:48] And that came up, I think in our previous episode on racism. It’s the idea that we all kind of form these ideas about people based on perhaps a split second view of, of what we see of them. Is that right? Dr. Dunham: [03:01] Yes, that’s right. So we can form categories of people very quickly, we can decide that someone belongs to, in particular, certain categories, what we might think of as the most salient ways in which we group people, things like age, gender, race, these things tend to come to mind quite quickly. And even as you talked about in that last episode, even kind of automatically, in terms of as soon as we encounter someone even for the first time Jen: [03:25] And is it right that it’s kind of a survival mechanism that we, we wouldn’t physically be able to process the information that we needed to process. If I looked at you and try to think about who you are on an individual trade by trade basis, I wouldn’t also be able to conduct this conversation with you. Dr. Dunham: [03:41] I mean at least it would certainly be much more difficult. And the way I think about it as categories of people are really just one kind of category and we have categories of all kinds of other things. We have categories of objects in the room, you know, tables and chairs, and we have categories of animals and plants and in all of those domains, these are really, really useful. These really simplify the job of thinking about the world. You know, if you tell me there’s a chair in the other room, I don’t have to think that hard about what the thing is like that you have in the other room and I can occasionally be surprised if it’s, you know, some fun midcentury modern thing, but I have a pretty clear idea of what’s going to be in the other room and what it’s going to be good for – sitting on say. And that’s super useful and this is true for people as well and in many domains it doesn’t bother us at all and needn’t, right? when you will go see a dentist. We have a lot of ideas about what skills this dentist ought to have and how we’re going to interact with that dentist. And that’s, as you’re pointing out, immensely useful and just kind of smoothing the interactions we have. I don’t have to go in there wondering how it all works. Right. I have a lot of prior knowledge I can draw on. Jen: [04:41] All right, so since we’re talking about, you know, what are some different social groups, tell us about who were the Zarpies and who were the Gorps and what did you find children’s relationships with Zarpies and Gorps? Dr. Dunham: [04:52] So both my lab and some of my collaborators and some of this research was in collaboration with a bunch of other people, but I’ll just mention Marjorie Rhoads, a professor at NYU who has done a lot of work in the same vein and those are basically Zarpies and Gorps – those are just nonsense labels that we use to introduce children to some brand new social group that we, the researchers have made up. The reason we do this is while we do a lot of research on groups like race or gender, it gets a lot more complicated because different kids have such a different range of background experiences. They may have learned different things, experienced different things and so there’s just a lot more variability and what kids might think about those groups. But if we use these groups that we’ve created, like as Zarpie, we know that what kids know about it is absolutely nothing right when they come into our lab, they had no prior knowledge because we made them up and that way we can get a clearer view of children’s more intuitive or natural ways of thinking about groups when you pull out or abstract away from prior knowledge. Dr. Dunham: [05:50] So that’s a little background for why we might use these kinds of funny sounding groups that are just designed to be intriguing to children. Right. And kind of fun sounding to children. And in the research that we did, basically we introduced children to a group like the Zarpies and in one case we induced them to essentialize the group. In other words, to think about the Zarpies as really being something deep and important about who you are. And another case we didn’t. We didn’t lead them to think about Zarpies and such and such an essentialized manner. And then we asked, did this manipulation – did the extent to which we lead kids to be centralized. The group change how they felt about the group that if for example, lead them to dislike the group more or to share less resources, less of the child’s own resources with them, and we did this because there’s been a long standing series of arguments about the relationship between essentialism and prejudice with a lot of people, assuming that essentialism will lead to prejudice, that if you essentially as a group, you’re more likely to consider it to be prejudice towards that group and maybe not to go on for too long, but just to motivate that intuition, why might we think that if you think groups are really, really deeply important and based on internal properties of of the people and you had learned that a group has some bad property. Dr. Dunham: [07:07] Maybe take an example with gender. Let’s say you hold a stereotype that boys are better at math than girls. If you essentialize that category, you’re very likely to think, well, that must be something about the nature of boys and girls. That’s what it’s like to be a boys, is to be better at math, to be a girl is to be worse at math. In fact, in that case we think that’s probably not true. It’s probably much more likely that it’s cultural factors, but the danger of essential, as I think comes out pretty clearly here, if you essentialize the group and you now know that the groups differ in some way, you’re likely to think that that difference is very deep and kind of natural rather than cultural or environmental. So this is what we wanted to test in a more experimental fashion with the Zarpies. And what we found is it actually didn’t in our study, lead to more prejudice. So kids were actually pretty positive about these cartoonish Zarpies that we introduced them to. However it did lead them to not be as willing to share with them to be in some sense less generous when they were sharing resources with the Zarpies. Jen: [08:06] And this is when they are a member of the Zarpie group or when they are a member of the Gorp group? Dr. Dunham: [08:10] So in this one, children are not actually members of either groups or just learning about this as another group, but in that sense the Zarpies are kind of an outgroup as a group to which they do not belong and this was a little bit surprising to us. So we sort of replicated it a few times to make sure we really had it right. But what we think is going on now as if you think about it a little more, there can be a really good or really bad or really positive or really negative group that you might have essentialize. So there’s not a necessary connection. We think now between sort of valence like how good or bad the group is and whether you essentially it, but we think that essentialism essentially maybe a bad choice of words, but essentialism leads us to really think of the boundary between groups as very rigid and strong. And when you do, it seems that kids elect to not share as much as they think about that group is really distinct and different from them. They think, well, I’ll keep my resources to myself rather than sharing, but they don’t necessarily think the group is bad. Jen: [09:07] Okay, alright. And then didn’t you do a follow up experiment where you made the children a part of the Zarpie group and tell them that they were also Zarpies. Dr. Dunham: [09:16] So we’ve done studies a lot like this. Not always using things like Gorps and Zarpies; sometimes just using something even simpler like a blue group and a red group. And in these kinds of studies we and lots of people have done these studies now with children going all the way down to about age three. And so for example, in some of the studies I’ve done in this line, if you simply tell a child you’re going to be in the red group, why don’t you put on this red shirt so you really remember which group you’re going to be in. We find that actually that in and of itself is enough to get kids to like their own group more. So that’s enough to get kids to think. Yeah, the red group seems like it’s probably better. And also to even be willing to share more with members of their own group and so on. Jen: [09:55] Yeah. I’ve noticed that this phenomenon is alive and well in adults as well. Dr. Dunham: [10:00] Absolutely. Jen: [10:01] Yeah. I remember sitting in a. I actually went to Yale for my first masters and I did some classes in the business school and I remember one of the professors saying, you know, you guys are all here; you’ve come from disparate walks of life. You don’t have very much in common. I mean obviously in business school you do have some things in common, but you are going to be enticed to think of each other as a sort of a cohesive unit and do favors for each other and help each other get ahead in your careers based on the fact that you’re all sitting together in the classroom, which really to a large extent is pretty arbitrary. Dr. Dunham: [10:35] Yeah, absolutely. I think this is an immensely important point. Thinking about how humans, reason about groups and even about the development of racism, because what it says is we’re really flexible in what groups we decide to care about or affiliate with and we’re not just flexible. Some of them are essentially things that...