Testing the limits of structural thinking about gender

Abstract

White for help with data collection, and Ilayda Orhan and Haley Hegefeld for coding. Data Availability Statement:All study materials, data files, and analysis code that replicates all results in the manuscript and supplemental materials are also openly shared and are available on an anonymous link at: https://osf.io/6kx4e/?view_only=33413fde2df346328f32e0bc5e72d11e. LIMITS OF STRUCTURAL THINKING 2 Research Highlights• Two studies probed children's structural reasoning about gender norms and explored evaluative and behavioral implications of this reasoning process with both novel and familiar gendered behaviors.• Children as young as 4 attend to structural cues to explain gendered behaviors and adjust their judgments about mutability and acceptability of those behaviors accordingly.• However, they still have internalist tendencies in explaining familiar gendered behaviors and show group-based discrimination.

Verbally Highlighting Extrinsic Causes of Novel Social Disparities Helps Children View Low-Status Groups as Structurally Disadvantaged Rather Than Personally Inferior

“…In other words, structural attributions might enable children to causally account for observed disparities while avoiding personal attributions and their pernicious consequences. Optimistically, emerging research supports the idea that even young children are capable of forming structural attributions (Hussak and Cimpian, 2015;Vasilyeva et al, 2018;Peretz-Lange and Muentener, 2019;Yang et al, 2021). The present study contributes to this emerging research area in a few ways: First, the research on structural attributions often involves explicitly telling children about the cause of a given disparity (e.g., Hussak and Cimpian, 2015;Sutherland and Cimpian, 2019;Rizzo et al, 2020;Dunlea and Heiphetz, 2021).…”

“…This would indicate that framing shapes participants' conceptual understanding of disparities, rather than only their perceptual attention to different features of the visual scene, though we do not claim this indicates any longer-lasting impacts of framing outside of the context of the experiment. We also predicted that structural attributions would increase over development, as in prior work on structural attributions for gender differences (Vasilyeva et al, 2018;Amemiya et al, 2021;Yang et al, 2021).…”

“…A final way that the present study builds on existing research is through its inclusion of social attitude measures. Research has demonstrated promising consequences of structural reasoning on a variety of outcomes, including children's moral evaluations of disparities (Elenbaas et al, 2016), tendency to perpetuate disparities (Elenbaas et al, 2016;Rizzo et al, 2020), view of disparities as mutable (Vasilyeva et al, 2018;Yang et al, 2021), evaluations of nonconformity (Yang et al, 2021), and support for reducing structural obstacles (Elenbaas, 2019). In the present study, we examine impacts on social attitudes.…”

“…Second, most research on structural reasoning focuses on real-world groups (e.g., gender, see Vasilyeva et al, 2018;Rizzo et al, 2020;Amemiya et al, 2021;Yang et al, 2021) and real-world disparities (e.g., incarceration, Dunlea and Heiphetz, 2021;school achievement, Goudeau and Cimpian, 2021). The use of real-world groups has important benefits for external validity.…”

Thinking Structurally: A Cognitive Framework for Understanding How People Attribute Inequality to Structural Causes

“…Emerging evidence suggests, to the contrary, that presenting people with information only about current structural constraints may be insufficient to promote structural thinking. For example, even when reasoners observe obvious structural constraints on girls' and boys' toy choices (e.g., girls could only reach dolls and not trucks), they still endorse intrinsic explanations for gender-stereotypical play behavior (Amemiya et al, 2021;Yang et al, 2021). A counterfactual approach argues that, without evidence that the structural constraints were difference-making (e.g., that girls would not have only played with dolls had there been fewer constraints), reasoners may reject that constraints caused the social group differences and continue to privilege intrinsic explanations.…”