028: How do children form social groups?

How social groups are formed has profound implications for what we teach our children about our culture. Professor Yarrow Dunham of Yale University tells us how we all group people in our heads according to criteria that we think are important – in many cases it’s a valuable tool that allows us to focus our mental energy. But when we look at ideas like race and gender, we see that we tend to classify people into these groups based on criteria that may not actually be useful at all. This episode will shed further light on Episode 6, “Wait, is my toddler racist?” and will lay the groundwork for us to study groupings based on gender in an upcoming episode. References Baron, A.S. and Dunham, Y. (2015). Representing “Us” and “Them”: Building blocks of intergroup cognition. Journal of Cognition and Development 16(5), 780-801. DOI: http://dx.doi.org.library.capella.edu/10.1080/15248372.2014.1000459 (10.1080/15248372.2014.1000459) Baron, A.S., Dunham, Y., Banaji, M., and Carey, S. (2014). Constraints on the acquisition of social category concepts. Journal of Cognition and Development 15(2), 238-268. DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2012.742902 Dunham, Y., Baron, A.S., and Carey, S. (2011). Consequences of “minimal” group affiliations in children. Child Development 82(3), 793-811. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01577.x Dunham, Y., Chen, E.E., and Banaji, M.R. (2013). Two signatures of implicit intergroup attitudes: Developmental invariance and early enculturation. Psychological Science Online First. DOI: 10.1177/0956797612463081 Dunham, Y., Stepanova, E.V., Dotsch, R., and Todorov, A. (2015). The development of race-based perceptual categorization: Skin color dominates early category judgments. Developmental Science 18(3), 469-483. DOI: 10.1111/desc.12228 Rhodes, M., Leslie, S-J, Saunders, K., Dunham, Y., and Cimpian, A. (In Press). How does social essentialism affect the development of inter-group relations? Developmental Science. Retrieved from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306482087_How_does_social_essentialism_affect_the_development_of_inter-group_relations (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306482087_How_does_social_essentialism_affect_the_development_of_inter-group_relations) Richter, N., Over, H., and Dunham, Y. (2016). The effects of minimal group membership on young preschoolers’ social preferences, estimates of similarity, and behavioral attribution. Collabra 2(1), p.1-8. DOI: : 10.1525/collabra.44 https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fyourparentingmojo.com%2Fsocialgroups%2Fandlinkname=028%3A%20How%20do%20children%20form%20social%20groups%3F ()https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/twitter?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fyourparentingmojo.com%2Fsocialgroups%2Fandlinkname=028%3A%20How%20do%20children%20form%20social%20groups%3F ()https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/pinterest?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fyourparentingmojo.com%2Fsocialgroups%2Fandlinkname=028%3A%20How%20do%20children%20form%20social%20groups%3F ()https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/email?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fyourparentingmojo.com%2Fsocialgroups%2Fandlinkname=028%3A%20How%20do%20children%20form%20social%20groups%3F ()