Children's beliefs about causes of human characteristics: Genes, environment, or choice?

The social aspects of illness: Children's and parents' explanations of the relation between social categories and illness in a predominantly white U.S. sample

The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has had a disproportionate impact on Black, low-income, and elderly individuals. We recruited 175 predominantly white children ages 5-12 and their parents (N = 112) and asked which of two individuals (differing in age, gender, race, social class, or personality) was more likely to get sick with either COVID-19 or the common cold and why. Children and parents reported that older adults were more likely to get sick than younger adults, but reported few differences based on gender, race, social class, or personality. Children predominantly used behavioral explanations, but older children used more biological and structural explanations. Thus, children have some understanding of health disparities, and their understanding increases with age.

Genetic essentialist beliefs about criminality predict harshness of recommended punishment

Genetic essentialism is a set of beliefs holding that certain categories have a heritable, intrinsic, and biological basis. The current studies explore people's genetic essentialist beliefs about criminality, how such essentialism relates to beliefs about appropriate punishment, and the kinds of judgments and motivations that underlie these associations. Study 1 validated a novel task, in which respondents estimated how possible it would be for a child to inherit criminal behavior from a sperm donor with whom they had no contact. Studies 2-4 used this task to address how genetic essentialist beliefs related to the harmfulness of a crime and the harshness of recommended punishment. Results indicated a tendency to essentialize both low- and high-harm crimes, though genetic essentialism was higher for more harmful crimes. Moreover, genetic essentialist beliefs predicted recommendations for harsher punishments, with retributive and protective motivations, as well as perceptions of recidivism risk, partially mediating this association. Further, Studies 3 and 4 found that genetic essentialism positively predicted support for harsh punishments such as the death penalty, as well as support for directing financial resources more toward law enforcement and less toward social support. Lay theories about criminality may have profound implications for decisions about appropriate punishment for wrongdoers, as well as broader policy decisions about crime, punishment, and resource allocation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Societies and other kinds of social groups

People live in distinct groups, notably territory-holding societies, whose boundaries aren't neatly defined by the traits that Pietraszewski describes for his socially aligned groups (or SAGs), as I propose calling them, which occur both within and between our societies. Although studying SAGs could prove enlightening, societies are essential human groups that likely existed long before the complex SAGs of today.

Ending genetic essentialism through genetics education

Genetic concepts are regularly used in arguments about racial inequality. This review summarizes research about the relationship between genetics education and a particular form of racial prejudice known as genetic essentialism. Genetic essentialism is a cognitive form of prejudice that is used to rationalize inequality. Studies suggest that belief in genetic essentialism among genetics students can be increased or decreased based on what students learn about human genetics and why they learn it. Research suggests that genetics education does little to prevent the development of genetic essentialism, and it may even exacerbate belief in it. However, some forms of genetics education can avert this problem. In particular, if instructors teach genetics to help students understand the flaws in genetic essentialist arguments, then it is possible to reduce belief in genetic essentialism among biology students. This review outlines our knowledge about how to accomplish this goal and the research that needs to be done to end genetic essentialism through genetics education.

Categories convey prescriptive information across domains and development

Young children display a pervasive bias to assume that what they observe in the world reflects how things are supposed to be. The current studies examined the nature of this bias by testing whether it reflects a particular form of reasoning about human social behaviors or a more general feature of category representations. Children aged 4 to 9 years and adults (N = 747) evaluated instances of nonconformity among members of novel biological and human social kinds. Children held prescriptive expectations for both animal and human categories; in both cases, they said it was wrong for a category member to engage in category-atypical behavior. These prescriptive judgments about categories depended on the extent to which people saw the pictured individual examples as representative of coherent categories. Thus, early prescriptive judgments appear to rely on the interplay between general conceptual biases and domain-specific beliefs about category structure.