Andrew Scott Baron

The Development of Implicit Attitudes Evidence of Race Evaluations From Ages 6 and 10 and Adulthood

To understand the origin and development of implicit attitudes, we measured race attitudes in White American 6-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and adults by first developing a child-oriented version of the Implicit Association Test (Child IAT). Remarkably, implicit pro-White/ anti-Black bias was evident even in the youngest group, with self-reported attitudes revealing bias in the same direction. In 10-year-olds and adults, the same magnitude of implicit race bias was observed, although self-reported race attitudes became substantially less biased in older children and vanished entirely in adults, who self-reported equally favorable attitudes toward Whites and Blacks. These data are the first to show an asymmetry in the development of implicit and explicit race attitudes, with explicit attitudes becoming more egalitarian and implicit attitudes remaining stable and favoring the in-group across development. We offer a tentative suggestion that mean levels of implicit and explicit attitudes diverge around age 10.

Children and social groups: A developmental analysis of implicit consistency in Hispanic Americans

We investigated the development of three aspects of implicit social cognition (self-esteem, group identity, and group attitude) and their interrelationships in Hispanic American children (ages 5 to 12) and adults. Hispanic children and adults showed positive implicit self-esteem and a preference for and identification with their in-group when the comparison group was another disadvantaged minority group (African American). However, challenging the long-held view that childrens early intergroup attitudes are primarily egocentric, young Hispanic children do not show implicit preference for or identification with their in-group when the comparison was the more advantaged White majority. Results also supported predictions of cognitive-affective balance in the youngest children. Strikingly, balance was absent in adults, suggesting that in disadvantaged minority groups, cognitive-affective consistency may actually decline with age.

Children’s multiplicative transformations of discrete and continuous quantities

Recent studies have documented an evolutionarily primitive, early emerging cognitive system for the mental representation of numerical quantity (the analog magnitude system). Studies with nonhuman primates, human infants, and preschoolers have shown this system to support computations of numerical ordering, addition, and subtraction involving whole number concepts prior to arithmetic training. Here we report evidence that this system supports childrens predictions about the outcomes of halving and perhaps also doubling transformations. A total of 138 kindergartners and first graders were asked to reason about the quantity resulting from the doubling or halving of an initial numerosity (of a set of dots) or an initial length (of a bar). Controls for dot size, total dot area, and dot density ensured that children were responding to the number of dots in the arrays. Prior to formal instruction in symbolic multiplication, division, or rational number, halving (and perhaps doubling) computations appear to be deployed over discrete and possibly continuous quantities. The ability to apply simple multiplicative transformations to analog magnitude representations of quantity may form a part of the toolkit that children use to construct later concepts of rational number.

The Second Shift Reflected in the Second Generation Do Parents’ Gender Roles at Home Predict Children’s Aspirations?

Gender inequality at home continues to constrain gender equality at work. How do the gender disparities in domestic labor that children observe between their parents predict those children’s visions for their future roles? The present research examined how parents’ behaviors and implicit associations concerning domestic roles, over and above their explicit beliefs, predict their children’s future aspirations. Data from 326 children aged 7 to 13 years revealed that mothers’ explicit beliefs about domestic gender roles predicted the beliefs held by their children. In addition, when fathers enacted or espoused a more egalitarian distribution of household labor, their daughters in particular expressed a greater interest in working outside the home and having a less stereotypical occupation. Fathers’ implicit gender-role associations also uniquely predicted daughters’ (but not sons’) occupational preferences. These findings suggest that a more balanced division of household labor between parents might promote greater workforce equality in future generations.

Representing ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: Building Blocks of Intergroup Cognition

Three experiments explored whether group membership affects the acquisition of richer information about social groups. Employing a minimal-groups paradigm, 6- to 8-year-olds were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 novel social groups. Experiment 1 demonstrated that immediately following random assignment to a novel group, children were more likely to generalize negative behaviors to outgroup members and positive behaviors to ingroup members and to report a preference for ingroup members. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that this initial ingroup-favoring bias interacts with subsequent learning, thereby attenuating the effect of negative information about the ingroup and enhancing the effect of negative information about the outgroup. These effects were more powerful with respect to preferences than induction: After hearing that some ingroup members behaved badly, children predicted that ingroup members would behave more negatively than outgroup members, but they did not express preferences for the outgroup over the ingroup. Together these data shed light on the construction of social category knowledge as well as the processes underlying the absence of own-group positivity among children from lower-status social groups.

Infants use relative numerical group size to infer social dominance

Significance The ability to detect dominance relationships is essential for survival because it helps individuals weigh the potential costs and benefits of engaging in a physical competition. Here we show that infants as young as 6 mo of age are capable of detecting dominance relations when provided with an ecologically relevant cue such as social group size. Furthermore, infants can infer the social dominance relationship between two competing individuals based on the size of the group to which they belong, and expect individuals from a numerically larger group to get their way. These findings reveal that infants may have an evolutionarily ancient cognitive capacity to represent social dominance relations that is shared with other species within the animal kingdom. Detecting dominance relationships, within and across species, provides a clear fitness advantage because this ability helps individuals assess their potential risk of injury before engaging in a competition. Previous research has demonstrated that 10- to 13-mo-old infants can represent the dominance relationship between two agents in terms of their physical size (larger agent = more dominant), whereas younger infants fail to do so. It is unclear whether infants younger than 10 mo fail to represent dominance relationships in general, or whether they lack sensitivity to physical size as a cue to dominance. Two studies explored whether infants, like many species across the animal kingdom, use numerical group size to assess dominance relationships and whether this capacity emerges before their sensitivity to physical size. A third study ruled out an alternative explanation for our findings. Across these studies, we report that infants 6–12 mo of age use numerical group size to infer dominance relationships. Specifically, preverbal infants expect an agent from a numerically larger group to win in a right-of-way competition against an agent from a numerically smaller group. In addition, this is, to our knowledge, the first study to demonstrate that infants 6–9 mo of age are capable of understanding social dominance relations. These results demonstrate that infants’ understanding of social dominance relations may be based on evolutionarily relevant cues and reveal infants’ early sensitivity to an important adaptive function of social groups.

Constraints on the Acquisition of Social Category Concepts

Determining which dimensions of social classification are culturally significant is a developmental challenge. Some suggest this is accomplished by differentially privileging intrinsic visual cues over nonintrinsic cues (Atran, 1990; Gil-White, 2001), whereas others point to the role of noun labels as more general promoters of kind-based reasoning (Bigler & Liben, 2007; Gelman, 2003). A novel groups procedure was employed to examine the independent effects of noun labels and visual cues on social categorization. Experiment 1 demonstrated that in the absence of a visual cue, a noun label supported social categorization among 4-year-olds and 7-year-olds. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that children and adults fail to differentiate between intrinsic and nonintrinsic visual cues to category membership, suggesting that this distinction is not central to the acquisition of social category concepts. Experiments 2 and 3 also showed that in the absence of a shared noun label, visual cues were not sufficient for younger children to form social categories. Experiment 4 ruled out a potential demand characteristic in the previous experiments. Together, these results reveal the primacy of verbal labels over visual cues for social categorization in young children and suggest a developmental change between ages 4 and 7 in the ability to construct new representations of social category concepts.

Agency Attribution in Infancy: Evidence for a Negativity Bias

Adults tend to attribute agency and intention to the causes of negative outcomes, even if those causes are obviously mechanical. Is this over-attribution of negative agency the result of years of practice with attributing agency to actual conspecifics, or is it a foundational aspect of our agency-detection system, present in the first year of life? Here we present two experiments with 6-month-old infants, in which they attribute agency to a mechanical claw that causes a bad outcome, but not to a claw that causes a good outcome. Control experiments suggest that the attribution stems directly from the negativity of the outcome, rather than from physical cues present in the stimuli. Together, these results provide evidence for striking developmental continuity in the attribution of agency to the causes of negative outcomes.

Tuning to the Positive: Age-Related Differences in Subjective Perception of Facial Emotion

Facial expressions aid social transactions and serve as socialization tools, with smiles signaling approval and reward, and angry faces signaling disapproval and punishment. The present study examined whether the subjective experience of positive vs. negative facial expressions differs between children and adults. Specifically, we examined age-related differences in biases toward happy and angry facial expressions. Young children (5–7 years) and young adults (18–29 years) rated the intensity of happy and angry expressions as well as levels of experienced arousal. Results showed that young children—but not young adults—rated happy facial expressions as both more intense and arousing than angry faces. This finding, which we replicated in two independent samples, was not due to differences in the ability to identify facial expressions, and suggests that children are more tuned to information in positive expressions. Together these studies provide evidence that children see unambiguous adult emotional expressions through rose-colored glasses, and suggest that what is emotionally relevant can shift with development.

Enhancing "theory of mind" through behavioral synchrony

Theory of mind refers to the abilities underlying the capacity to reason about one’s own and others’ mental states. This ability is critical for predicting and making sense of the actions of others, is essential for efficient communication, fosters social learning, and provides the foundation for empathic concern. Clearly, there is incredible value in fostering theory of mind. Unfortunately, despite being the focus of a wealth of research over the last 40 years relatively little is known about specific strategies for fostering social perspective taking abilities. We provide a discussion of the rationale for applying one specific strategy for fostering efficient theory of mind—that of engaging in “behavioral synchrony” (i.e., the act of keeping together in time with others). Culturally evolved collective rituals involving synchronous actions have long been held to act as social glue. Specifically, here we present how behavioral synchrony tunes our minds for reasoning about other minds in the process of fostering social coordination and cooperation, and propose that we can apply behavioral synchrony as a tool for enhancing theory of mind.