Shreya Sodhi presents poster at Cognitive Development Society conference
Shreya presented a poster titled "Considering immigration disrupts children's essentialist beliefs about nationality" at the biennial meeting of the Cognitive Development Society (CDS).
This research is done in collaboration with Dr. Zoe Liberman.
"We investigated how 4- to 11-year-old American children (N = 188) reason about national identity for both nonimmigrants and immigrants. Previous research finds that American children tend to essentialize national identity, or think it is a stable and informative aspect of one's identity, and expect people from the same country to be more similar than people of the same gender on an inductive potential task. In this study, while we replicate that effect for nonimmigrants, we find that children are more flexible in how they consider immigrants. Rather than attending to their heritage country, children appear to be attending to gender and host country, suggesting that they understand that national identity can change as a result of immigration."
Way to go, Shreya!
