RR: Collaborative: Origins of Intergroup Perceptions and Attitudes Across Diverse Contexts

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Within the first five years of life, children become adept at categorizing others into social categories, which has wide-ranging implications for children's perceptions and interactions with others. Yet much of what is known about how children process social categories is based on studies conducted with limited populations (in terms of only including children from certain race/ethnic, geographical, and socioeconomic backgrounds). By harnessing natural variation in exposure to diversity in different regions of the U.S. among children from different backgrounds, the current project will lead to a better understanding of how young children from throughout the United States conceptualize and reason about social categories. A second goal is to test the robustness of past results regarding children's social category understanding and to contribute to recent calls for transparency, reproducibility, and generalizability in science.The project involves five sites (Hawaii, the Southwest, the Northwest, the Southeast, and the Northeast), with each site including 4- to 5-year-old children from multiple demographic backgrounds. The focus is on four core components of early social category knowledge: children's attitudes towards; prosocial behavior with; facial recognition of; and perceptions of status of members of different social categories. Children will complete a standardized protocol and task battery that assesses each of these components across all five geographic locations in the U.S. The research will examine whether results are reproducible across geographic regions that differ in their demographics. It will also investigate how individual tasks relate to each other within each child (e.g., the relationship between perceptions of status and behavior towards children from different groups). This approach will also allow tests of the robustness of past results regarding children's knowledge of social categories and will contribute to recent calls for transparency, reproducibility, and generalizability in science. This goal will be implemented by: (1) posting all study materials so that the exact methods can be implemented elsewhere; (2) posting all final data so that others can re-analyze the data; and (3) pre-registering the proposed analyses in line with recent recommendations for transparency in research. By achieving a better understanding of the origins of intergroup perceptions and attitudes, broader impacts are expected to support focused interventions that promote positive relations between different groups of people.