028: How do children form social groups?

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: