Children's Stereotypes About Social Group Prevalence

Previous research has found that girls (ages 4-9) persist less on science tasks when they are introduced to these tasks with identity-focused language (e.g., asking children to “be scientists”) instead of action focused language (e.g., asking children to “do science”), but that this linguistic cue has more variable consequences for boys (sometimes helping them, sometimes impeding them, and sometimes having no consequence at all). This work also shows that neither general gender stereotypes nor gender stereotypes about science can explain the effects of language in previous work. Here we test an alternative hypothesis to explain the gendered effect of this language—that girls might be averse to identities or roles that position them as outliers, even if an outlier position is positive or advantageous. The present study tests this hypothesis by introducing children to a novel social group, which is either described as being statistically rare or common in the world. We examine whether the statistical prevalence (i.e., a cue to outlier status) of a social group influences children’s persistence in a related task, as well as their evaluations of their own skill at that task and their social judgments of others who do or do not belong to the target group. Overall, we expect that 4- and 5-year-old children are sensitive to the prevalence of social groups and that this information shapes their behavior and judgments. We expect that a novel social group’s statistical prevalence, whether group membership is described as rare or common, may influence the various outcomes outlined below. If children are indeed sensitive to group prevalence, we also expect that their interpretation of prevalence will influence the extent to which prevalence condition (rare vs. common) affects each dependent variable (e.g., a child who is told that group prevalence as rare might interpret that as so rare that only one individual in the world belongs to that group, or as less rare, such that anything less than a majority of individuals in the world belong to that group). Thus, in instances where there is an effect of condition (either a main effect, or an interaction with participant gender), we will conduct secondary analyses including prevalence ratings as a predictor in the model. This study tests the hypothesis that information about group prevalence will influence four- and five-year-old children’s beliefs about their own relation to the category. We will test how information influences children’s: (1) beliefs about whether they are members, (2) desire to be a member, and (3) persistence on a category-relevant task. We will also test for effects on children’s beliefs about category: (4) prestige, and (5) difficulty, and the extent to which they (6) form gender stereotypes about the category, and (7) incorporate information about the category into their social preferences.