Baldwin, DareWeinstein, Netanel2024-12-192024-12-192024-12-19https://hdl.handle.net/1794/30284Human cognition often displays a tendency to “see beyond” the available perceptual input. Although inferences indicative of such seeing-beyond tendencies are fundamental to efficiency in human cognition, they may also be associated with the expression of prejudice towards stigmatized others. In this dissertation, we systematically compared college students’ and children’s inductive generalization tendencies regarding two stigmatized social categories: foreignness and disability. Since such cues may be apparent both in speech (i.e., a foreign accent; a speech disorder) and appearance (i.e., foreign garb; a wheelchair), directly juxtaposing children and college students’ reactions to such cues may be particularly informative regarding the development of foreignness and disability concepts alike. In a first study, we compared 180 North American college-aged students’ and 163 young children’s (Mage = 5.75) explicit assessments of a) three speech categories (neurotypical American English - L1, Spanish English - L2, and American English with Autism Spectrum Disorder - ASD), and b) four illustration categories (children whose appearance was: able-bodied typical North American appearance; able-bodied foreign appearance; typical North American wheelchair-bound with signs of contracture in the wrist and torticollis in the neck; and typical North American amputee appearance) along several key dimensions (i.e., foreignness, dependence, competence, interest in friendship and comprehensibility for speech). To further explore developmental change in inductive generalization tendencies, in study 2, we assessed 130 college-aged students’ and 143 North American children’s (Mage = 5.3) associations between speech variability and visual appearance. Specifically, participants listened to one of three speech conditions (L1, L2, ASD) while looking at two illustrations side-by-side (one of a typical American child, the other depicting a foreign child or a child with a disability) and were asked to select the child who was talking. Across both studies, college students, but not children, appeared to associate the variability they detected in the ASD speech with a latent disability concept in a similar manner to which both samples associated L2 speech with foreignness. Nevertheless, there was an emerging age-related increase in this tendency for children as well, particularly for those with advanced metacognition. Furthermore, whereas college students were biased against ASD speakers but showed a prosocial bias towards images depicting physical disabilities (particularly amputees), children were biased against wheelchair (and foreign) images but showed no bias in the case of ASD speech. This work advances our understanding of complex ways in which conceptual representations of the social world relate to the expression of prejudice, and how such relationships may change developmentally. Our findings also hold potential to inform development of empirically-oriented interventions to reduce the expression of prejudice in childhood and across the lifespan.en-USAll Rights Reserved.Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)CategorizationDisabilityFolk SociologyFriendship PreferencePrejudiceElectronic Thesis or Dissertation