Projects from Mark Bennett

Project Title: Developmental aspects of the process of social categorisation

Duration: Ongoing program

Funding: Previously funded by the ESRC, currently seeking funding

Collaborators: Dr Fabio Sani, University of Dundee

Further Information:

Social categorisation is a mental process through which we group individuals into categories. Treating people not as unique individuals but as members of social categories has very important implications for the way that we behave towards those individuals. In our research we examine three aspects of the development of the process of social categorisation in children:

(1) The extent to which children spontaneously categorise individuals into different groups. Previous research has shown that if children are presented with, say, photographs of different people they will, if asked to indicate "which ones go together?", sort them into different groups (boys/girls, black/white, etc.) Although this is interesting, it does not tell us if these are the categories that children unthinkingly use. We tackled this issue by means of the "who said what?" technique. Specifically, in 3 experiments, children were presented with 4 photographs, two of members of one social group (e.g. black people) and two of members of another social group (e.g. white people), together with 16 statements attributed to those people (i.e., 4 statements per person). Subsequently, 16 statement cards each had to be assigned to a particular photograph, to indicate "who said what?" To the extent that children make more within-group than between-group confusions (e.g. getting confused about which black person made a particular statement rather than whether it had been made by a black or white person), we can say that they had spontaneously assimilated the information to the particular social categories represented in the photos. Using this technique we found that children spontaneously categorised individuals when the categories were gender- or ethnically-based, but not if they were age- or nationality-based.

We also devised a version of this task that made it more akin to real life - such that children had to remember what they themselves and others had said during a game-like encounter. Again, using this more naturalistic technique, we provided evidence that children spontaneously assimilate information about individuals to social categories (in this case, gender). Thus, we can now say that children spontaneously assimilate information about individuals to certain social categories.

(2) A further question we posed was "Are there developmental changes in the content of children's representations of social groups (i.e. their stereotypes)?" We were interested to know whether the features on which children focus when thinking about social categories differ with age. Based upon three studies, we conclude that there are important age-related changes.

In our first study we interviewed children about the characteristics of members of various social groups (e.g. boys, girls, adults, children, Christians, etc). Young children's stereotype content was found to be largely concerned with personal and behavioural attributes; little was understood about belief-based attributes, such as values and ideology.

In our second and third studies we used more structured tasks and looked at whether children made a distinction between attributes which are merely characteristic of members of a particular group (e.g. it is characteristic of children that they like to play games and eat sweets) and those which are defining (e.g. a two-year-old is necessarily a child). We found that adults' concepts about categories are structured more around defining features than characteristic ones. Interestingly, however, young children seemed not to make this distinction sharply and took characteristic attributes as necessary to group membership (e.g. "boys must like to play football"; "to be a grown-up you must be able to drive"). Thus, the content and form of children's social stereotypes would seem to change with age. This has important implications for attitude-change programmes, in that they need to be sensitive to the nature of the content and organisation of young children's conceptions of social groups.

(3) Finally, we pose the question, "Do children's group stereotypes shift depending upon the context?" From previous research on adults, it is known that the particular conceptions of a social group will depend on the context in which the judgement is being made. For example, if Scottish adults are asked to say what Scots are like, they give different responses depending on which other groups they've just been asked to consider: if the English have been described, then Scots are seen as 'warm and friendly', whereas if Greeks have been described, Scots are seen as 'rather distant.'

There are good theoretical grounds for thinking that children will have rather rigid conceptions of social groups and that we might not be able to replicate the sorts of effects established for adults. In fact, what we found was that (i) when thinking about national stereotypes, context made little difference, but (ii) when thinking about gender stereotypes, context had an impact. Thus, if children had first described adults of their own gender followed by children of their own gender, they gave different responses from those cases where they had first described children of the opposite gender and then their own gender. For example, boys would say that boys were 'brave' and 'strong' if girls, rather than men, had just been described. This challenges the implicit view, widely held by researchers, that children's stereotypes are rigid and independent of the social context. Thus, even amongst children stereotyping is likely to be a complex and situationally variable phenomenon.

Project Title: The development of national, ethnolinguistic & religious identity in children & adolescents living in the NIS.

Duration: 1998-2001

Funding: INTAS

Collaborators: M.Barrett (Surrey University), I. Vila (Girona, Spain), T.Borisovna (Moscow, Russia), V.Pavlenko (Ukraine), G.Kipiani (Georgia), R. Karakozov (Azerbaijan).

Further Information:

This research examines, within a transnational framework, the development of national, ethnolinguistic and religious identity in children living in Russia, Ukraine Georgia and Azerbaijan. In the wake of the collapse of the USSR, there have been substantial political, social and economic changes in the NIS, and in some cases these changes have been accompanied by a dramatic upsurge in the expression of ethnic & national loyalties. This situation provides scientists with a unique historical opportunity to investigate the psychological parameters within which people acquire their national, ethnolinguistic and religious identities. Drawing on social identity theory and social representations theory, we are exploring many empirical questions concerning the relationship between context and identity-related cognitions.