New research has found that preschool children primarily categorize individuals based on their weight or body shape, rather than race or skin color. Additionally, these children use weight or body shape, rather than race, to infer internal characteristics (imaginary substances within the body, in this context) of people depicted in drawings. The study was published in Developmental Science.
Preschool children categorize objects by relying on concrete and observable characteristics, such as color, shape, size, and texture. Their early classification abilities are driven by perceptual features that are easily distinguishable in their environment. For instance, they might group items based on shared attributes like all red objects or things with wheels. They rely on tangible qualities of objects rather than abstract concepts.
Scientists have identified a tendency in preschoolers to categorize objects based on prominent perceptual features, termed “shape bias.” While shape bias has been extensively studied in relation to objects, it was unclear whether children apply the same categorization to people. Studies indicate that children attribute more negative characteristics to overweight individuals compared to those of average or thin build. They are also less inclined to choose overweight individuals as representations of strong positive abilities. This bias is evident even in very young children.
Study authors Rebecca Peretz-Lange and Melissa M. Kibbe wanted to examine preschoolers’ shape bias once again and explore whether it extends to the social domain i.e., to categorizing people. They wanted to know whether children would label objects and people based on their weight/body shape rather than their race. They hypothesized that this effect would intensify with age. To explore this, they conducted two studies.
The first study involved 50 children aged four and five, including 28 girls. Researchers interacted with the children and their caregivers via Zoom. In a typical trial, a researcher would show a picture of a dog and identify it as such. Then, they would present pictures of a frog, a dog, and a parrot, each with a different color underline, and ask the child to identify the other dog. Similar trials followed with a cat.
After these trials, the children were tasked with matching a human drawing to other drawings of the same human but with varying body shapes or different skin colors. The researchers also included variations in gender. The aim was to determine whether children would match humans based on skin color (race) or body shape. For example, the researcher would refer to a figure as a “Zarpie” – a fabricated category – and ask, “Who else is a Zarpie?” Another set of tasks examined whether children would match objects based on gender or body weight/shape.
The second study aimed to explore how children extend novel internal properties to people based on their body shape versus their race. It involved 20 children, aged four and five. The trials resembled those in the first study, but instead of categorizing drawings into the same group (e.g., “Who else is a Zarpie?”), children were asked to identify individuals with the same fictional internal property (e.g., “Flurp in their blood, Zarpie inside her body, Gazzer in the brain…”).
Results of the first study showed that, as expected, children match drawing of objects primarily based on shape (i.e. select objects with the same shape as matches for the target object). When matching drawings of humans, children overwhelmingly chose the drawing of the same person with the same body shape (but different skin color) over drawings of people of different weight (i.e., body shape). In other words, body shape was much more important for them than skin color.
The results of the second study corroborated the first: children more frequently matched based on body weight/shape rather than skin color, and they chose gender and weight as matching criteria with equal frequency.
“We found that children’s shape biases extend into the social domain. Our results suggest that early shape biases support a view of shape as a highly meaningful and informative characteristic of people, not only of objects,” the study authors concluded.
The study sheds light on the perception processes of preschool children. However, it should be noted that the study inferences were based on categorizations of drawings, not of real people. A study examining how children categorize real people with all their complexities might not yield equal results.
The paper, “Shape bias” goes social: Children categorize people by weight rather than race”, was authored by Rebecca Peretz-Lange and Melissa M. Kibbe.
