Young children perceive less humanness in outgroup faces

McLoughlin, Niamh and Tipper, Steven and Over, Harriet (2017). Young children perceive less humanness in outgroup faces. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852856

Ostracism, or being ignored and excluded by others, is part of our daily lives. It has been documented across historical time and diverse cultural contexts and is reported with striking regularity when people are asked to describe their social relationships. One reason for this is that ostracism plays a key role in maintaining cooperative behaviour within the group: individuals actively avoid interacting with known cheaters. Ostracism is not always so easily justified however; at times, it is used as a way to isolate individuals who are perceived to be different from the majority. The experiments in this grant will investigate the roots of this complex social phenomenon in development. Drawing on previously disparate literatures in social, developmental and evolutionary psychology, the work will examine the situations under which young children (aged 3-8) exclude others from their interactions. The cross cultural component of the project will test which aspects of children’s social decision making may be culturally invariant and which vary depending on the community children grow up in.

Data description (abstract)

We investigated when young children first dehumanize outgroups. Across two studies, 5- and 6-year-olds were asked to rate how human they thought a set of ambiguous doll-human face morphs were. We manipulated whether these faces belonged to their gender in- or gender outgroup (Study 1) and to a geographically based in- or outgroup (Study 2). In both studies, the tendency to perceive outgroup faces as less human relative to ingroup faces increased with age. Explicit ingroup preference, in contrast, was present even in the youngest children and remained stable across age. These results demonstrate that children dehumanize outgroup members from relatively early in development and suggest that the tendency to do so may be partially distinguishable from intergroup preference. This research has important implications for our understanding of children's perception of humanness and the origins of intergroup bias.

Data creators:

Creator Name	Affiliation	ORCID (as URL)
McLoughlin Niamh	University of York
Tipper Steven	University of York	http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7066-1117
Over Harriet	University of York	http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9461-043X

Sponsors:

Economic and Social Research Council

Grant reference:

ES/K007602/1

Topic classification:

Psychology

Keywords:

psychology, children, dehumanisation

Project title:

"I don't want to play with you";: Young children's use of social exclusion

Grant holders:

Harriet Over

Project dates:

From	To
31 December 2013	30 June 2017

Date published:

25 Oct 2017 14:00

Last modified:

25 Oct 2017 14:15

Coverage and Methodology

Collection period:

Date from:	Date to:
31 December 2013	30 June 2017

Geographical area:

North east and Yorkshire

Country:

United Kingdom

Data collection method:

We investigated whether children perceive less humanness in outgroup faces relative to ingroup faces. In order to do this, we adapted a paradigm from the adult literature to make it suitable for developmental research. Hackel et al. (2014) presented a set of face stimuli that were generated by morphing doll faces with human faces to create a series of continua that ranged from 0% animate (i.e., doll face) to 100% animate (i.e., human face). In two studies, Hackel et al. (2014) manipulated the group to which these faces belonged by informing participants that some of the faces were based on morphs developed from ingroup members and others were based on morphs developed from outgroup members. Participants were then asked to rate the extent to which each face looked like it ‘had a mind’ on a 7-point scale. Results indicated that the threshold for perceiving a mind in a face was lower for ingroup members, when fewer human cues were present (at approx. 60% increment along the continuum), compared to the threshold for outgroup faces (at approx. 70% increment along the continuum). In other words, ingroup faces were humanized, and perceived to have a mind, more readily than were outgroup faces.

We modified this paradigm in the following ways. First, we substantially reduced the number of trials by identifying the most ambiguous doll-human morph from each face continuum in a pretest study with adults. This allowed us to have eight test trials rather than the 110 that were presented to adult participants. Second, we modified the test question and, instead, asked participants how human the face appeared. Our final modification involved the way in which children gave their responses. We asked them to estimate how human each face looked on a 4-point scale as follows: 0 = Not at all human, 1 = A little bit human, 2 = A medium amount human, 3 = Completely human. We predicted that children would judge the morph faces to be less human when they belonged to their outgroup than when they belonged to their ingroup.

Observation unit:

Individual

Kind of data:

Numeric

Type of data:

Experimental data

Resource language:

English

Access and Administration

Data sourcing, processing and preparation:

For both studies, children were given a score from 0 (No at all human) to 3 (Completely human) for each face. Children's responses for Study 1 were independently coded by another researcher and agreement was 100% for both humanness and preference scores. Humanness ratings for ingroup and outgroup faces were created for each child by averaging responses for the four ingroup and outgroup trials. (The ratings for the four female faces were averaged to act as girls’ ingroup score while the average rating for the four male faces acted as boys’ ingroup score.) In order to correlate the extent of dehumanization with children's age, we created a relative dehumanization score for each participant by subtracting their mean outgroup rating from their mean ingroup rating. Higher scores on this measure implied a greater bias towards outgroup dehumanization. Children's preference for their ingroup and outgroup was also measured on a very similar 4 point scale (0=not at all, 1=a little bit, 2=a medium amount, 3=a lot). We additionally created a relative own-group preference score by subtracting outgroup preference scores from ingroup scores. Higher positive relative preference values represented an overall greater explicit preference for the ingroup.

Rights owners:

Name	Affiliation	ORCID (as URL)
McLoughlin Niamh	University of York
Tipper Stephen	University of York	http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7066-1117
Over Harriet	University of York	http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9461-043X