Description | Michael Rizzo, Ph.D. Postdoctoral Fellow, New York University Promoting Social Equity Through Developmental Science The United States is facing a pervasive crisis of social inequality. To address this crisis, we need to understand the psychological roots of the discriminatory practices and policies that maintain social disparities based on gender, race, and other social identities. In this talk, I will examine the critical role that developmental science can play in promoting social equity by identifying the psychological processes and developmental mechanisms that underlie children’s emerging concern for equity and developing intergroup biases. In the first section of my talk, I will review how conceptions of equity develop in early childhood and how children balance the conflicting concerns for equity and equality in contexts with preexisting inequalities. I will then present evidence documenting children’s ability to distinguish between individually- and structurally-based inequalities and how children’s perceptions of social inequalities are contingent upon their unique perspectives within them. In the second section of my talk, I will examine how children’s foundational beliefs about the structure of the social world developmentally predict the emergence of harmful intergroup biases. Specifically, I will review evidence from a recent longitudinal study revealing how children’s normative beliefs about racial segregation and explanatory beliefs about racial hierarchy developmentally predict the emergence of racial bias and discuss key environmental factors that predict variation in this development. I will conclude by outlining several avenues for how developmental science can be leveraged to promote social equity in childhood through the integration of novel methodologies, technological advancements, and theoretical concepts from economics, sociology, and social psychology. This lecture is part of the candidate review process for the Integrative Development faculty position in the Department of Psychology. Faculty host: Andrew Meltzoff, meltzoff@uw.edu. Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by 2/17/21 to chairpsy@uw.edu. |
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