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Do we infrahumanize our children?

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Resumo:When we think of what makes us human, our complex reasoning skills and secondary emotions (e.g., pride, shame) probably come to mind, which is largely supported by the scientific literature. Children are yet to develop many of those uniquely human characteristics. Does this mean that they are not perceived as fully human (i.e., infrahumanized)? We tested this infrahumanization of children hypothesis using three different paradigms. In Study 1, participants categorized human and chimpanzee faces, of both juvenile and adult individuals, by quickly clicking on the appropriate label “person” or “chimpanzee”, while mouse-tracking software recorded their mouse pointer trajectories. Contrary to our predictions, trajectories for human children faces were actually straighter (i.e., more direct to the “person” label) than for adults faces, while the opposite was true for chimpanzee faces, F(1,44) = 9.92, p = .003. Participants in Study 2 assigned words from a list to adult and child targets. The list contained both positive and negative human- and animal-related words. If participants infrahumanized children in this task, more human-related words should be assigned to adults than to children. Results showed a tendency to assign more typically human words to adults than to children, F(1,59) = 3.28, p = .075. In Study 3, participants rated a list of 61 words (positive and negative, typically human and typically animal words) as to how adult- or child-related they considered them to be. Results from this study showed that the more typically-animal a word was, the more it was perceived to be related to children, r(58) = .74, p < .001. I discuss the implications of these (inconsistent) results for the infrahumanization of children hypothesis, as well as propose follow-up studies to overcome each study’s limitations, in an attempt to better answer the guiding question.
Autores principais:Santos, João Filipe de Oliveira
Assunto:Infra-humanização Crianças Desumanização Animalístico Teses de mestrado - 2017
Ano:2017
País:Portugal
Tipo de documento:dissertação de mestrado
Tipo de acesso:acesso aberto
Instituição associada:Universidade de Lisboa
Idioma:inglês
Origem:Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa

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