Current Projects

To accurately explain inequality between social groups, it is critical for people to recognize structural causes, which are societal forces that systematically advantage some groups and disadvantage others. This line of research draws from counterfactual theories of causal judgment to propose a cognitive framework of how children and adults attribute inequality to structural causes (e.g., Amemiya et al., in press at Perspectives on Psychological Science). New work with Lin Bian is exploring which types of evidence best support children's and adults' structural thinking and motivation to rectify inequality. 

Perceptions of social status hierarchies underlie the development of group biases. In this line of research, we are studying children's and adults' representations of social status hierarchies in Indonesia, where ethnic groups hold distinct forms of social status (i.e., either wealth or political influence, but not both). With my students, Kiara Widjanarko and Irene Chung,  we find that children as young as 6.5 years old can associate ethnic groups with distinct forms of status and that there is a greater preference for groups with wealth than political influence.

Claims of genetic superiority are at the heart of White supremacist ideology. Current genetics education curriculum does not equip students with the tools to refute these racist essentialist arguments, and in some cases may unintentionally perpetuate essentialist thinking. With my colleagues at BSCS Science Learning, we have developed anti-racist genetics educational modules that teach students why racial essentialism is scientifically inaccurate, and why a structural view of racial inequality is more empirically sound. We are currently testing this approach with psychology and biology undergraduate students.

There are an infinite number of ways to categorize people into groups. Cultural contexts are a central influence on young learners' social categorization, and their reasoning about the causal structure of social groups (i.e., whether groups are biologically or culturally determined).  This project, with student mentee, Daniela Sodré, examines children's and adults' racial concepts in Brazil, where racial categorization is more closely tied to a malleable trait, skin tone, rather than to ancestry. New work with Daniela and Jackie Chen will further examine the correlates and consequences of adults' race concepts in Brazil and the U.S.

One challenge when learning from others is that people often disagree.  How do we resolve disagreement? Sometimes it makes sense to figure out which perspective is more correct and disregard the other view.  Alternatively, we could consider disagreement as evidence that the referent may be something ambiguous that can elicit multiple rational perspectives. In this case, it may be useful to integrate divergent perspectives to infer something neither speaker mentioned.  We find that this latter strategy is late-emerging (~10 years of age; Amemiya et al., 2021). With Gail Heyman and Tobi Gerstenberg, we are testing a computational model of the underlying cognitive processes.

Whether reasoning about social inequality or Covid-19, there is remarkable heterogeneity in people's judgments about the causes of societal problems. This set of projects explores the cognitive mechanisms that lead to causal belief polarization. We propose that people can "manufacture" their preferred causal judgments by cherrypicking counterfactual evidence. Current work with Caren Walker and Gail Heyman is exploring this hypothesis with respect to people's causal reasoning about a global pandemic (see also Amemiya et al., 2021), and future work plans to extend this project to the domain of social inequality.