The Development of Structural Thinking about Social Categories

儿童理解社会世界的一种方式是通过形成对不同类别的人的心理表征，例如“女孩”和“男孩”或“儿童”和“成人”。形成这样的类别是总结信息和支持新推理的有用方式。例如，如果你知道一个人属于“孩子”一类，你就可以推断这个人很年轻。这项工作调查了儿童的社会类别是什么样子，以及他们的类别如何影响他们解释和推理社会世界的各个方面的方式。特别是，这些实验侧重于儿童是否以及何时能够意识到，一个社会类别的成员可以与一种财产相关联，这不仅是因为有共同的内在特征或偏好，而且是因为类别成员所处的更大的社会结构的结果。例如，女孩可能会与粉色衣服联系在一起，因为她们对粉色有内在的偏好，或者相反，因为她们所处的社会结构增加了她们选择粉色衣服的可能性，这可能是因为外部限制，比如可用性和社会接受度。以这种方式对社会范畴进行推理需要“结构性思维”。这项拟议的工作将绘制从学龄前到儿童早期的结构思维的发展和后果。理解社会类别的性质和发展是重要的，原因有很多。在理论层面上，结构思维挑战了社会范畴表征的主导方法，从而开辟了新的理论可能性。在实践层面上，了解儿童如何学习和推理社会类别，对于制定有效方法减轻有害刻板印象的影响至关重要，这种刻板印象不仅可能对儿童与他人的互动产生负面影响，而且还会对儿童如何看待自己--或自己--产生负面影响。更广泛地说，结构思维在我们对大多数复杂系统进行有效推理的能力中发挥着重要作用：社会结构中的人、在生态系统中运行的个体物种，或者在州和联邦指导方针下运行的城市，仅举几例。了解结构性思维何时以及如何出现，可以为儿童教育工作的发展提供信息，并支持成年后更好的决策。

One way children make sense of the social world is by forming mental representations of categories of people, such as "girls" and "boys" or "children" and "adults." Forming such categories is a useful way to summarize information and to support novel inferences. For instance, if you learn that a person belongs to the category "child," you can infer that the person is young. This work investigates what children's social categories look like, and how their categories affect the way they explain and reason about aspects of the social world. In particular, the experiments focus on whether and when children are able to appreciate that members of a social category can be associated with a property not only because of shared intrinsic characteristics or preferences, but also as a consequence of the larger social structure in which the category members are situated. For instance, girls could be associated with pink clothing because they have an intrinsic preference for pink, or instead because they are embedded in a social structure that increases the probability that they will select pink, perhaps due to external constraints such as availability and social acceptability. Reasoning about social categories in this way requires "structural thinking." The proposed work will chart the development and consequences of structural thinking from preschool through early childhood.Understanding the nature and development of social categories is important for a variety of reasons. At a theoretical level, structural thinking challenges dominant approaches to the representation of social categories, and therefore opens up new theoretical possibilities. At a practical level, understanding how children learn and reason about social categories is crucial for developing effective ways to mitigate the effects of harmful stereotypes, which could negatively affect not only a child's interactions with others, but also how the child thinks about him- or herself. More generally, structural thinking plays an important role in our ability to reason effectively about most complex systems: people embedded in social structures, individual species operating within ecosystems, or cities operating within state and federal guidelines, to name just a few. Understanding when and how structural thinking emerges can inform the development of educational efforts in childhood and support better decision-making in adulthood.