Societal assumptions regarding typical personhood and their effects on reasoning development

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Project Summary This project will uncover the developmental processes by which children acquire the belief that White males represent the default person—a pattern rooted in the ideologies of androcentrism (centering the experiences of men) and ethnocentrism (centering the experiences of White people) prevalent in the United States. Despite national rises in racial and gender diversity, White men remain vastly overrepresented across a host of domains within the U.S., from media, to politics, to clinical research. Such overrepresentation poses severe costs to the rest of society—women of all races, men of color, and gender-nonconforming individuals— particularly within the domain of health, where clinical trials have historically prioritized the experiences, perspectives, and health outcomes of White men. To address this issue, we must understand when and how the tendency to view White males as default people develops across childhood, as well as the environmental factors that underlie this phenomenon. Specifically, we need to know (a) the developmental trajectory by which children’s default representations of people begin to favor Whiteness and maleness over other identities, (b) the specific domains across which children do (and do not) activate a White male default to guide social reasoning, and (c) the sociocultural and ecological factors that can prevent the development of these beliefs. Young children actively construct knowledge to make sense of their social environments. As part of this process, children absorb complex streams of information from the sources around them, including parents, peers, and broader societal institutions (e.g., media). Thus, the beliefs children acquire tend to reflect the dominant ideologies embedded in their specific cultural contexts: within the United States, androcentrism and ethnocentrism represent two such ideologies. The proposed research will uncover the ways in which children’s representations of the broad category people reflect both androcentrism and ethnocentrism. To this end, Aim 1 will reveal the developmental trajectory of children’s beliefs that White males—more so than Black males, White females, or Black females—best exemplify a person. Aim 2 will clarify the scope of children’s beliefs about who best exemplifies a person by testing the consistency of this belief across domains. Finally, Aim 3 will uncover the features of children’s sociocultural and ecological environments that underlie beliefs about who best exemplifies a person, providing insight into the mechanisms underlying the patterns documented in Aims 1 and 2. By administering these studies via an innovative platform for remote, unmoderated research, we have the unique opportunity to reach families from all across the United States. The diversity afforded by this platform allows us to capture a holistic picture of the phenomenon in question and the mechanisms underlying it, broadening both the empirical rigor and real-world impacts of our findings.