Developmental shifts toward structural explanations and interventions for social status disparities

Abstract

As part of their early "essentialist" intuitions, young children view intergroup differences as reflecting groups' intrinsic natures. In the present study, we explore the nature and development of "structural" reasoning, or view of intergroup differences as reflecting groups' extrinsic circumstances. We introduced participants (n = 315; ages 5-6, 9-10, and adults) to novel intergroup status disparities that could be attributed to either personal or structural causes.Disparities were verbally framed in either intrinsic, neutral or extrinsic terms. We assessed attributions by asking participants to explain the disparities and to offer interventions for them.We also assessed participants' status-based social preferences. We found that attributions shifted from personal to structural over development. Explanations and interventions for the disparities were correlated and related to the same predictors (framing and age) and outcomes (social preferences), although interventions were consistently more structural than explanations.Implications for essentialism, causal reasoning, and social development are discussed.

Testing the limits of structural thinking about gender

“…Supporting this, recent work finds that when discussing incarceration and law-breaking both children and adults favor internal and behavioral explanations, and they rarely reference societal factors or endorse structural explanations (Dunlea & Heiphetz, 2020). And in a study involving competition between novel social groups, even when both internal (differences in physical strength) and structural (forms of competition) factors were equally present, children viewed the losing group as inferior rather than structurally disadvantaged except when structural factors were verbally emphasized repeatedly (Peretz-Lange et al, 2021). Further, for some phenomena such as social inequalities, people might be motivated to emphasize internal factors (e.g., merit) when they can be used to justify social structures that are to their benefit (see literature on system justification theory and just-world beliefs; e.g., Jost et al, 2004;Rubin & Peplau, 1975).…”

“…Besides evaluations, Study 2 also investigates children's behavioral intentions (whether they choose to affiliate with non-conforming peers); these two critical attitudinal and behavioral choice measures probe the potential consequences of structural vs. non-structural reasoning. Unlike most past work on this topic that either did not probe the consequences of structural reasoning (Vasilyeva et al, 2018) or only probed evaluative judgments (Dunlea & Heiphetz, in press;Peretz-Lange et al, 2021;Van Wye et al, 2020), our work examined both evaluative judgments and behavioral intentions, providing a test of the effects of structural cues on a wider range of outcomes. As stated above, our goal is to test whether structural reasoning is impactful on attitudes and behavioral intentions even when preexisting beliefs are strong, as in many cases outside of laboratory settings where researchers and practitioners seek to reduce the negative consequences of stereotyping.…”

“…However, being able to endorse structural reasoning about novel behaviors that were experimentally created does not necessarily guarantee an equivalent ability to think about familiar behaviors that exist outside of a lab context in a structural way. We argue that this is an important consideration given how much past work has employed novel behaviors (see also Peretz-Lange et al, 2021;Van Wye et al, 2020). Notably, many familiar gendered behaviors are already entrenched as stereotypes (e.g., boys don't cry, girls play with dolls), and may already pull for salient internal or essentialist explanations (e.g., girls play with dolls because girls have a caring nature).…”

Why does social essentialism sometimes promote, and other times mitigate, prejudice development? A causal discounting perspective

“…Moreover, if domain differences in alternative explanations account for domain differences in consequences of essentialism, then promoting these alternative explanations should produce the opposite effects. Indeed, research suggests that in domains where essentialism promotes prejudice, structural explanations reduce prejudice (e.g., Hussak & Cimpian, 2015;Peretz-Lange et al, 2021). In domains where essentialism mitigates prejudice, agentic explanations promote prejudice (e.g., Carvalho, Peretz-Lange, & Muentener, 2021;Spence, Helwig, & Cosentino, 2018).…”

“…Next, although novel group paradigms have been used to investigate the prejudicepromoting consequences of essentialism (e.g., Hussak & Cimpian, 2015;Peretz-Lange et al 2021;Rhodes et al, 2018), these paradigms have not been used to investigate the prejudicemitigating consequences of essentialism. Future research should use novel group methods to investigate the circumstances under which essentialism mitigates prejudice.…”