Speaking of Kinds: How Correcting Generic Statements can Shape Children's Concepts

Children's gendered expectations of moral parties

Do children have gendered expectations of moral parties? Here we asked 5-10-year-olds (N = 177) in the United States to indicate whether boys or girls were agents or patients of morally good and bad actions. Children of all ages, and of both genders, showed a strong and consistent expectation that boys are perpetrators of various moral wrongs. Moreover, whereas girls expected girls to be benefactors, boys had no systematic gendered expectations regarding benefactors. As for moral patiency, children picked their own gender, regardless of valence: boys chose boys as victims and beneficiaries, and girls chose girls as victims and beneficiaries. Given the potentially far-reaching implications of such moral expectations, these findings invite further questions regarding the mechanisms and consequences of these early-emerging gendered patterns.

How generic language shapes the development of social thought

Generic language, that is, language that refers to a category as an abstract whole (e.g., 'Girls like pink') rather than specific individuals (e.g., 'This girl likes pink'), is a common means by which children learn about social kinds. Here, we propose that children interpret generics as signaling that their referenced categories are natural, objective, and have distinctive features, and, thus, in the social domain, that such language affects children's beliefs about the social world in ways that extend far beyond the content they explicitly communicate. On this account, even generics expressing uncontentious content (e.g., 'Girls are great at math') can lead children to think of categories as defining fundamentally distinct kinds of people and contribute to the development of stereotypes and other problematic social phenomena.

The role of exceptions in children's and adults' judgments about generic statements

Generic statements (e.g., "Ducks lay eggs") provide generalizations about kinds that can be judged as true, even in the face of exceptions. Although past research has focused on the positive evidence that justifies a generic, little work has explored the role of evidence that does not match the generic claim (e.g., ducks that do not lay eggs). The current studies aim to understand how different types of exceptions may differentially undermine generic claims. In Studies 1 and 2, adults (n = 560) and children ages 5-11 (n = 141) were asked to judge the truth of generic statements about fictitious animal kinds (e.g., Wugs have blue horns). Accompanying each statement was a set of 6 kind members, some of which displayed the target property (e.g., blue horns), and others of which displayed either an alternative property (e.g., red horns), or an absence of the property (e.g., no horns). Study 1 found that adults were less likely to endorse generic statements when non-matching examples displayed an alternative property than when they displayed an absence of the property. Study 2 indicated that children as well as adults were less likely to endorse generic statements when presented with alternative evidence, regardless of the salience of the alternative. Study 3 replicated these findings with a more sensitive task in which adults (n = 120) and children (n = 97) were asked to choose between sets with either alternative or absence evidence. These studies provide the first evidence that children and adults attend to non-matching evidence when making judgments about generic statements, interpret alternative evidence to be stronger counterevidence than absence evidence, and do not use the salience of alternative properties to determine the strength of alternative evidence. We discuss the implications of this work for problematic generic claims in language and thought.

The effect of language structures in social event attribution among L2 English learner

This article investigates whether English positive-negative alternating causal clauses and active-passive alternating syntactic structures make a difference in social event attribution of Chinese-L1 English-L2 learners. Results of sentence completion tasks show that there is no across-the-board language effect on attribution tendencies to the patient, the agent and the interactive parties, which are the constituents of the target sentences, but passive structures induce more attribution to the patient than its counterparts, and that L2 learners exhibit a gradience of attribution preferences for the patient, followed by the agent and the interactive parties in whichever clause or syntactic conditions. The causal reasoning patterns found in this study failed to support the claim of Linguistic Relativity, while validating the hypothesis regarding the patient-directed Causal Asymmetry Bias. Results are discussed with respect to the relationship between language and thought.

Tell me your (cognitive) budget, and I'll tell you what you value

Consider the following two (hypothetical) generic causal claims: "Living in a neighborhood with many families with children increases purchases of bicycles" and "living in an affluent neighborhood with many families with children increases purchases of bicycles." These claims not only differ in what they suggest about how bicycle ownership is distributed across different neighborhoods (i.e., "the data"), but also have the potential to communicate something about the speakers' values: namely, the prominence they accord to affluence in representing and making decisions about the social world. Here, we examine the relationship between the level of granularity with which a cause is described in a generic causal claim (e.g., neighborhood vs. affluent neighborhood) and the value of the information contained in the causal model that generates that claim. We argue that listeners who know any two of the following can make reliable inferences about the third: 1) the level of granularity at which a speaker makes a generic causal claim, 2) the speaker's values, and 3) the data available to the speaker. We present results of four experiments (N = 1323) in the domain of social categories that provide evidence in keeping with these predictions.