Shreya Sodhi presents poster at Cognitive Development Society conference

Recently, Shreya presented a poster on data from a pilot study at the 2024 meeting of the Cognitive Development Society. In this study, we were interested in children’s categorization of immigrants (as (dis)similar to their heritage and host country) and in their attitudes towards immigrants with different acculturation strategies. Here, we found that American children expected nonimmigrants to be like (only) people from their heritage country, but expected immigrants to either integrate (be similar to people from both countries) or assimilate (be similar to (only) people from their host country). In terms of attitudes, children preferred integrators over both assimilators and separators, though, these preferences were based on similarity to the self (with children liking people who identified with American culture).