Nonverbal displays of dominance and prestige: Evidence for cross-cultural and early-emerging recognition.

Two universal strategies for attaining influence-dominance, or the use of intimidation and force to obtain power, and prestige, or garnering respect by demonstrating knowledge and expertise-are communicated through distinct nonverbal displays in North America. Given evidence for the emergence and effectiveness of these strategies across cultures, including non-Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic small-scale, traditional societies in Africa, Asia, and South America, the nonverbal displays that are used to reliably communicate these strategies also might be universal. Here, we demonstrate that the dominance display is recognized by the Mayangna, a small-scale society in rural Nicaragua, and by Canadian children as young as 2 and 3 years old. We also find that the prestige display is reliably differentiated from dominance by both groups, and judged as a high-rank signal by the Mayangna. However, members of the Mayangna confused the prestige display with happiness, and children confused the prestige display with a neutral expression. Overall, findings are consistent with a ubiquitous and early-emerging ability to recognize dominance, and with the suggestion that the prestige display is more culturally variable and ontogenetically slower to emerge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Why Antibias Interventions (Need Not) Fail.

There is a critical disconnect between scientific knowledge about the nature of bias and how this knowledge gets translated into organizational debiasing efforts. Conceptual confusion around what implicit bias is contributes to misunderstanding. Bridging these gaps is the key to understanding when and why antibias interventions will succeed or fail. Notably, there are multiple distinct pathways to biased behavior, each of which requires different types of interventions. To bridge the gap between public understanding and psychological research, we introduce a visual typology of bias that summarizes the process by which group-relevant cognitions are expressed as biased behavior. Our typology spotlights cognitive, motivational, and situational variables that affect the expression and inhibition of biases while aiming to reduce the ambiguity of what constitutes implicit bias. We also address how norms modulate how biases unfold and are perceived by targets. Using this typology as a framework, we identify theoretically distinct entry points for antibias interventions. A key insight is that changing associations, increasing motivation, raising awareness, and changing norms are distinct goals that require different types of interventions targeting individual, interpersonal, and institutional structures. We close with recommendations for antibias training grounded in the science of prejudice and stereotyping.

Meta-Analytic Use of Balanced Identity Theory to Validate the Implicit Association Test.

This meta-analysis evaluated theoretical predictions from balanced identity theory (BIT) and evaluated the validity of zero points of Implicit Association Test (IAT) and self-report measures used to test these predictions. Twenty-one researchers contributed individual subject data from 36 experiments (total N = 12,773) that used both explicit and implicit measures of the social-cognitive constructs. The meta-analysis confirmed predictions of BIT's balance-congruity principle and simultaneously validated interpretation of the IAT's zero point as indicating absence of preference between two attitude objects. Statistical power afforded by the sample size enabled the first confirmations of balance-congruity predictions with self-report measures. Beyond these empirical results, the meta-analysis introduced a within-study statistical test of the balance-congruity principle, finding that it had greater efficiency than the previous best method. The meta-analysis's full data set has been publicly archived to enable further studies of interrelations among attitudes, stereotypes, and identities.

Who can speak that language? Eleven-month-old infants have language-dependent expectations regarding speaker ethnicity.

Research demonstrates that young infants attend to the indexical characteristics of speakers, including age, gender, and ethnicity, and that the relationship between language and ethnicity is intuitive among older children. However, little research has examined whether infants, within the first year, are sensitive to the co-occurrences of ethnicity and language. In this paper, we demonstrate that by 11 months of age, infants hold language-dependent expectations regarding speaker ethnicity. Specifically, 11-month-old English-learning Caucasian infants looked more to Asian versus Caucasian faces when hearing Cantonese versus English (Studies 1 and 3), but did not look more to Asian versus Caucasian faces when paired with Spanish (Study 2), making it unlikely that they held a general expectation that unfamiliar languages pair with unfamiliar faces. Moreover, infants who had regular exposure to one or more significant non-Caucasian individuals showed this pattern more strongly (Study 3). Given that infants tested were raised in a multilingual metropolitan area-which includes a Caucasian population speaking many languages, but seldom Cantonese, as well as a sizeable Asian population speaking both Cantonese and English-these results are most parsimoniously explained by infants having learned specific language-ethnicity associations based on those individuals they encountered in their environment.

Sources of implicit and explicit intergroup race bias among African-American children and young adults.

Implicit intergroup bias emerges early in development, are typically pro-ingroup, and remain stable across the lifespan. Such findings have been interpreted in terms of an automatic ingroup bias similar to what is observed with minimal groups paradigms. These studies are typically conducted with groups of high cultural standing (e.g., Caucasians in North America and Europe). Research conducted among culturally lower status groups (e.g., African-Americans, Latino-Americans) reveals a notable absence of an implicit ingroup bias. Understanding the environmental factors that contribute to the absence of an implicit ingroup bias among people from culturally lower status groups is critical for advancing theories of implicit intergroup cognition. The present study aimed to elucidate the factors that shape racial group bias among African-American children and young adults by examining their relationship with age, school composition (predominantly Black schools or racially mixed schools), parental racial attitudes and socialization messages among African-American children (N = 86) and young adults (N = 130). Age, school-type and parents' racial socialization messages were all found to be related to the strength of pro-Black (ingroup) bias. We also found that relationships between implicit and explicit bias and frequency of parents' racial socialization messages depended on the type of school participants attended. Our results highlight the importance of considering environmental factors in shaping the magnitude and direction of implicit and explicit race bias among African-Americans rather than treating them as a monolithic group.

Reducing Children's Implicit Racial Bias Through Exposure to Positive Out-Group Exemplars.

Studies with adults suggest that implicit preferences favoring White versus Black individuals can be reduced through exposure to positive Black exemplars. However, it remains unclear whether developmental differences exist in the capacity for these biases to be changed. This study included 369 children and examined whether their implicit racial bias would be reduced following exposure to positive Black exemplars. Results showed that children's implicit pro-White bias was reduced following exposure to positive Black exemplars, but only for older children (Mage  = ~10 years). Younger children's (Mage  = ~7 years) implicit bias was not affected by this intervention. These results suggest developmental differences in the malleability of implicit racial biases and point to possible age differences in intervention effectiveness.

Using Behavioral Consensus to Learn about Social Conventions in Early Childhood.

Adults make inferences about the conventionality of others' behaviors based on their prevalence across individuals. Here, we look at whether children use behavioral consensus as a cue to conventionality, and whether this informs which cultural models children choose to learn from. We find that 2- to 5-year old children exhibit increasing sensitivity to behavioral consensus with age, suggesting that like adults, young humans use behavioral consensus to identify social conventions. However, unlike previous studies showing children's tendencies to prefer and to learn from members of a consensus, the present study suggests that there are contexts in which children prefer and learn from unconventional individuals. The implications of these different preferences are discussed.

Unselective Overimitators: The Evolutionary Implications of Children's Indiscriminate Copying of Successful and Prestigious Models.

Children are both shrewd about whom to copy-they selectively learn from certain adults-and overimitators-they copy adults' obviously superfluous actions. Is overimitation also selective? Does selectivity change with age? In two experiments, 161 two- to seven-year-old children saw videos of one adult receiving better payoffs or more bystander attention than another. Children then watched the adults perform unnecessary actions on novel transparent devices. Children preferred the adult who received greater payoffs or bystander attention when asked questions like "Who do you think is smarter?" but overimitated both adults' unnecessary actions equally. Although older children overimitated more, unselectivity was consistent across ages. This pattern hints at a plausible adaptive function of overimitation: acquiring rarely demonstrated behaviors by practising them immediately.

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.

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.

The development of implicit intergroup cognition.

Challenging the view that implicit social cognition emerges from protracted social learning, research now suggests that intergroup preferences are present at adultlike levels in early childhood. Specifically, the pattern of developmental emergence of implicit attitudes is characterized by (i) rapidly emerging implicit preferences for ingroups and dominant groups and (ii) stability of these preferences across development. Together these findings demonstrate that implicit intergroup preferences follow a developmental course distinct from explicit intergroup preferences. In addition these results cast doubt on 'slow-learning' models of implicit social cognition according to which children should converge on adult forms of social cognition only as statistical regularities are internalized over a lengthy period of development.