CAREER: SBP: Understanding how diversity exposure impacts social categorization

人们根据种族、性别和国籍等属性将社会世界划分为不同的群体。从生命的早期开始，人们就使用关于另一个人的群体的信息来形成对那个人可能的特质和行为的期望。即使是婴儿也会期望同一群体中的人是相似的。期望一个群体中的人相似可能会为负面的刻板印象和偏见奠定基础。减少偏见的一个潜在方法是通过积极的互动。过去的研究表明，与来自陌生群体的人进行积极的互动可以改善对该群体其他成员的态度。但大多数社区并不包括来自各种背景的人的代表。因此，不可能与所有群体的人进行积极的互动。该项目提出了一个新的想法：更广泛地接触多样性（而不是接触特定群体）本身就可以减少陈规定型观念。这个想法是通过开发的婴儿和儿童的社区和网络的种族和语言多样性的措施，沿着传统的刻板印象的措施进行测试。该项目开发的接触多样性的新措施，基于熵的原则：网络包含更多的群体和更平等的群体代表性被评为更多样化。通过将这种新的措施与其他有效的儿童刻板印象措施相结合，研究将测试接触多样性的差异是否与刻板印象的差异有关。这种方法有助于解决一些基本问题。 一个是，接触种族多样性是否会减少基于种族的刻板印象。另一个问题是，接触多样性的影响是否更广泛，接触语言多样性是否可以减少基于种族的陈规定型观念。第三个问题是，儿童基于种族群体的刻板印象与语言群体的刻板印象相比如何。广泛的目标是更好地了解早期接触多样性与婴儿和儿童的陈规定型观念有何关系。基于实验室的研究是关键的第一步，可用于未来旨在减轻陈规定型观念负面影响的干预措施。该项目还为不同群体的早期职业研究人员提供社会心理学和发展科学方面的培训，并支持大学与当地博物馆之间旨在提高科学素养的合作伙伴关系。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

People divide the social world into groups, based on attributes such as race, gender, and nationality. Beginning early in life, people use information about another person’s groups to form expectations about that person’s likely traits and behaviors. Even infants expect people in the same group to be similar. Expecting people within a group to be similar may lay the foundation for negative stereotypes and bias. One potential way to reduce bias is through positive interactions. Past research has shown that positive interactions with someone from an unfamiliar group improves attitudes towards other members of that group. But most communities do not include representation of people from every background. As a result, it is not feasible to have positive interactions with people from all groups. This project develops a new idea: that exposure to diversity more broadly (rather than to a specific group) may itself reduce stereotyping. This idea is tested by developing measures of the racial and linguistic diversity of infants’ and children’s neighborhoods and networks along with traditional measures of stereotyping.The project develops novel measures of exposure to diversity, based on the principle of entropy: networks that contain a greater number of groups and with more equal representation of groups are scored as more diverse. By pairing this novel measure with other validated measures of children’s stereotyping, the research will test whether differences in exposure to diversity are related to differences in stereotyping. This approach helps to address a number of fundamental questions. One is whether exposure to racial diversity reduces race-based stereotyping. Another is whether the effects of diversity exposure are even broader, such that exposure to linguistic diversity can reduce race-based stereotyping. A third is how children’s stereotyping based on racial groups compares to linguistic groups. The broad aim is to better understand how early exposure to diversity is related to stereotyping in infants and children. The laboratory-based research is a critical first step that can be leveraged for future interventions aimed at mitigating the negative impacts of stereotyping. The project also provides training in social psychology and developmental science for a diverse group of early-career researchers, and supports partnerships between the university and local museums aimed at increasing scientific literacy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.