In one strand of research, we have been investigating how children learn to form first impressions of others. We know from previous research that, upon meeting a stranger, adults and children quickly jump to conclusions about whether or not that person is trustworthy or competent. These prejudiced first impressions have important social and economic consequences, for example, influencing hiring decisions and criminal sentencing. The mainstream view is that evolved features of human psychology make certain first impressions more likely – children are born with the capacity to distinguish leaders from followers and co-operators from defectors. In the MINDTOMIND project, we have refined and tested a learning based model of how first impressions from faces come about - the Trait Inference Mapping framework (TIM). Against the mainstream view, we argue that children learn to form these first impressions from exposure to the cultural messages common in storybooks, art, film, television and propaganda.
We showed that apparent evidence in favour of the nativist view is equally compatible with our learning-based account: learned first impressions appear early in development and occur quickly and automatically on meeting a new person. In further work, we investigated some of the ways in which learning occurs, demonstrating how children learn first impressions from observing the non-verbal behaviour of others and through social interactions with their primary caregivers.
In other research, we have investigated how children’s learning interacts with other features of cognition such as their motivation. Children are not merely passive recipients of information they receive from those around them, they seek out certain types of information over others. In the MINDTOMIND project we have built on our previous research showing that children prefer to read information that favours their own group and that this motivation to consume ingroup-favouring information influences their intergroup attitudes.
In a third strand of research, we investigated how best to characterise the nature of prejudice in adults. Previous research has suggested that adults tend to ‘dehumanise’ outgroups by denying them uniquely human mental states such as civility, rationality and warmth. Against this prevailing view, we have argued that outgroups are not denied uniquely human qualities, rather they are denied positive qualities. In a series of papers, we have shown that whereas outgroup members are denied positive uniquely human qualities such as civility and refinement, they are attributed negative uniquely human qualities such as spite and arrogance.
Understanding how social learning interacts with other features of human psychology such as theory of mind and social motivation can help inform applied research on how to encourage fairer social behaviours. In a further line of work, we have shown that encouraging children to reflect upon particular mental states of outgroup members leads them to engage in more prosocial behaviour towards members of that group.
We have published over twenty papers over the course of MINDTOMIND, including theoretical and empirical contributions. Research emanating from the project has been published in the top journals in our field including Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Perspectives in Psychological Science, Psychological Review, Cognition and Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
