how children and adults learn about different kinds of people, animals, and objects in the world.
I'm particularly interested in how we learn about the world through what other people tell us.
Adults frequently use generic language (e.g., "boys play sports”) to communicate about social groups to children. These statements make direct claims about the mentioned group (e.g., boys), but studies with Marjorie Rhodes suggests that they also communicate information about unmentioned kinds (e.g., that girls are not good at sports). By 4.5 years of age, children infer that things said in generic statements are not true of salient contrastive groups not explictly mentioned. Ongoing work is testing the boundaries of when children will or won't makes these inferences, and how these inferences may be linked to children's own stereotypes and essentialist thinking.
How might a child explain why girls pink and boys do not? Some children may answer this by appealing to something inherent about gender—that girls wear pink because they are girls or because of something inside (like their biology) that makes them different. These explanations appeal to essentialist beliefs: an assumption that people in different groups (e.g., gender) are fundamentally distinct from one another. Ongoing cross-cultural projects (in the US and China) are examining the developmental trajectories of essentialism, early cognitive biases that may be contributing to beliefs about essentialism, and the role of culture in transmitting these beliefs.
Adults prefer to sample evidence from diverse sources (e.g., looking at a robin and an ostrich to see if something true of birds). Children under age 9, however, often do not consider sample diversity, treating non-diverse samples (e.g., two robins) and diverse samples as equally informative. Work with Emily Foster-Hanson and Marjorie Rhodes shows that children and adults have different standards for evaluating evidence: younger children prefer to learn from examples that best approximate what category members should be like (e.g., the fastest cheetahs), with a shift across age toward samples that cover more variation (e.g., cheetahs of varying speeds).
Generic language plays a powerful role in transmitting social stereotypes by promoting support for social essentialism (i.e., beliefs that social groups are inherently different), consequently increasing endorsement of social stereotypes and negatively impacting inter-group relations. I am currently examining the use of generic language in the media, both in the news and on social media, to (1) measure the frequency of generic use on these mediums and (2) examine the cognitive, social, and political consequences of hearing generics in these contexts.
I taught an 8-week workshop for absolute beginners to learn the fundamentals of R needed to manipulate, visualize, and describe data. This workshop had a particular emphasis on producing clean and reproducible code in line with coding and open science best practices. The syllabus, readings, and online exercise are available online.
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