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，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论的有用方法。例如，如果你知道一个人属于“儿童”类别，你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的，以及他们的类别如何影响他们解释和推理社会世界的方式。特别是，实验的重点是儿童是否以及何时能够认识到，社会类别的成员可以与财产不仅是因为共享的内在特征或偏好，但也作为一个更大的社会结构中的类别成员所处的结果。例如，女孩可能与粉红色的衣服，因为他们有一个内在的偏好粉红色，或者相反，因为他们嵌入在一个社会结构，增加了他们将选择粉红色的概率，也许是由于外部约束，如可用性和社会可接受性。以这种方式推理社会类别需要“结构性思维”。“拟议的工作将绘制从学前到幼儿期的结构性思维的发展和后果。出于各种原因，理解社会类别的性质和发展非常重要。在理论层面上，结构性思维挑战了社会范畴表征的主流方法，因此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定型观念的影响至关重要，因为有害定型观念不仅会对儿童与他人的互动产生负面影响，还会对儿童如何看待自己产生负面影响。更一般地说，结构性思维在我们有效推理大多数复杂系统的能力中起着重要作用：嵌入社会结构中的人，在生态系统中运行的个体物种，或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时期的教育工作提供信息，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.