Social Environment Shapes Social Biases
Enduring racial inequality indicates that racial discrimination is deeply ingrained in the psychological processes that generate human social behavior. Yet, these tendencies are not present at birth and likely malleable early in life. Discriminatory tendencies may arise from an asymmetrical exposure to different social group members early in life, but relatively little is known about the relations between early social experience and the complex cognitive and affective processes involved in social biases. The primary goal of our research is to investigate how social experience, in particular contact with racial and linguistic diversity, relates to the development of social bias.
Accents as Another Source of Social Biases
Research on diversity often focuses on race. However, language and accent are also incredibly consequential group markers that even young children use to divide our social world. Language and accent can often mark one as an outsider and is the source of prejudice toward many immigrant populations. We aim to better understand how children’s early language environment can impact how they use language and accent to make social judgments about others
Early Emerging Understanding of Social Exclusion and Social Inequities
How do children begin to comprehend the consequence of social categorization? To do so, children need to first identify and understand social exclusion. Identifying social exclusion in everyday interactions is a first step toward comprehending more complex societal inequities. Our research demonstrates that the racial and linguistic diversity at the community level can have a profound impact on social group conception starting in the first year of life – much earlier than previously thought.