Department of Psychology, University of Trier, Germany.
Center for Social Psychology, University of Basel, Switzerland.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2022 Sep;229:103708. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103708. Epub 2022 Aug 11.
Social categorization is a crucial information processing strategy that adults deliberately adjust depending on goals and situational requirements. This study investigated whether flexibility in categorization is similarly present among preschool children. More specifically, we tested whether spontaneous gender categorizations are more pronounced for children with a situationally induced abstract compared to concrete construal level mindset. Sixty-one children first participated in a construal mindset induction task before completing a visual variant of the "who said what" memory task. Systematic memory confusions indicated that all children engaged in gender-based social categorization but that this tendency was accentuated in the abstract compared to concrete mindset condition. These results suggest an ability of children to modulate social categorizations. Implications for the development of intergroup biases are discussed.
社会分类是一种重要的信息处理策略，成年人会根据目标和情境要求有意地调整这种策略。本研究旨在探讨这种分类灵活性是否同样存在于学龄前儿童中。更具体地说，我们测试了在情境诱导的抽象与具体解释水平思维模式下，儿童的自发性别分类是否更加明显。61 名儿童首先参加了一种解释思维模式诱导任务，然后完成了“谁说了什么”记忆任务的视觉变体。系统的记忆混淆表明，所有儿童都进行了基于性别的社会分类，但这种趋势在抽象思维模式下比在具体思维模式下更为明显。这些结果表明，儿童有能力调节社会分类。讨论了这些结果对群体间偏见发展的意义。
