Türkiye’den Bir Örneklemde Cinsiyet, Irk ve Dile Dayalı Esasçı Düşüncenin Gelişimi

Yıl 2021, Cilt: 41 Sayı: 1, 279 - 300, 08.02.2021

Gaye Soley Telli Davoodi

https://doi.org/10.26650/SP2020-0051

Öz

Gelişimsel çalışmalar çocukların sosyal kategorilere dayalı esasçı bir düşünce tarzı benimsediklerine ve sosyal kategori üyeliğini doğal ve kalıcı olarak gördüklerine işaret etmektedir. Bu çalışmanın amacı Türkiye’den 6-10 yaş aralığındaki çocukların oluşturduğu bir örneklemde cinsiyet, ırk ve dile dayalı esasçı düşüncenin gelişiminin incelenmesidir. Bu sosyal kategorilerin hepsi algısal olarak ayırt edilebilir kategoriler olup, bir yandan da toplumdaki vurguları açısından farklılıklar göstermektedir. Bu kategorilere ek olarak referans oluşturması için ayrıca futbol takımı taraftarlığına dayalı sosyal kategorilere dair esasçı görüşler de incelenmiştir. Bu kapsamda esasçı düşüncenin biyoloji, değişim ve çevre gibi farklı boyutlarını kapsayan ve daha önce benzer yaş aralığındaki çocuklar ile aynı kültürel bağlamda farklı sosyal kategorileri incelemek için kullanılmış olan bir ölçüm kullanılmıştır. Çalışmanın sonuçları, altı yaşındaki çocuklarda farklı sosyal kategorilere dayalı esasçı çıkarımların birbirinden ayrışmadığını, ancak yaşla birlikte çocukların bu katego-rileri giderek daha fazla ayrıştırdıklarını göstermiştir. Türkiye bağlamında beklenen kültürel geçerliliklerindeki farklara rağmen, cinsiyet ve ırka dayalı esasçı çıkarımlar hem genel olarak hem de esasçı çıkarımların farklı boyutları açısından yaşla birlikte oldukça benzer bir eğilim göstermiş ve bu iki kategoriye dayalı esasçı düşüncede yaşla birlikte önemli oranda değişiklik gözlenmemiştir. Dile dayalı esasçı çıkarımlar da genel anlamda yaşla birlikte değişmezken, bir kişinin dile dayalı grup üyeliğinin değişiminin mümkün olup olmadığına dair esasçı görüşün yaşla birlikte önemli derecede azaldığı gözlenmiştir. Son olarak, takım taraftarlığına dayalı esasçı düşüncenin yaşla birlikte azaldığı gözlenmiştir. Bu sonuçlar, benzer sosyal kategorilere dayalı esasçı düşüncenin gelişimini bu kategorilerin kültürel öneminin farklılaştığı bağlamlarda inceleyen önceki çalışmalar ışığında tartışılarak sosyal kategorilere dayalı esasçı düşüncenin gelişiminde rol oynayan mekanizmaların daha iyi anlaşılması amaçlanmıştır

Anahtar Kelimeler

Sosyal biliş, sosyal esasçılık, sosyal grup

The Development of Essentialist Reasoning Based on Gender, Race and Language in a Sample from Turkey

Öz

Developmental studies suggest that children think in essentialist terms about social categories and view social category membership as natural and stable. This study aims to examine 6-to-10-year-old children’s essentialist views about gender, race, and language in a sample from Turkey. These are all categories with underlying perceptual markers, but they are likely to differ in terms of their cultural relevance within this context. In addition to these categories, essentialist beliefs about sports team fans were also examined as a reference category. A measure that captures different aspects of essentialist thinking including biology, change, and environment, and was previously used to study essentialist beliefs about different social categories in the same cultural context with a similar age group, was used. The results showed that around the age of 6 years, children did not distinguish among various social categories in their essentialist reasoning; however, with age, they gradually distinguished among some categories. Despite the differences in their cultural relevance within the context of Turkey, gender and race showed very similar patterns in how they were essentialized over age, both overall, and also with respect to different individual dimensions related to essentialist thinking. Essentialist thinking about both of these categories remained relatively stable across age. In terms of language, while overall essentialism scores remained stable across age, a substantial decrease in beliefs about capacity for changing one’s group membership was observed across age, when membership is based on language. Finally, children’s essentialist thinking about sports team fans decreased considerably with age. These findings are discussed in light of previous studies focusing on these categories in contexts, where the cultural saliency of the categories likely differ, in an attempt to offer a better understanding of the mechanisms contributing to the development of social essentialism

Anahtar Kelimeler

Social cognition, social essentialism, social groups

Kaynakça

• Allport, G. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. google scholar
• Astuti, R., Solomon, G. E., & Carey, S., (2004). Constraints on conceptual development: A case study of the acquisition of folkbiological and folksociological knowledge in Madagascar. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 69 (3, Serial No. 277). google scholar
• Atran, S. (1995). Causal constraints on categories and categorical constraints on biological reasoning across cultures. In Sperber, D., Premack, D., & Premack, A., (Eds), Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate (pp. 205-233). Oxford: Oxford University Press. google scholar
• Atran, S., Medin, D., Lynch, E., Vapnarsky, V., Ek, E. U., & Sousa, P. (2001). Folkbiology doesn’t come from folkpsychology: Evidence from Yukatek Maya in crosscultural perspective. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 1, 3-42. doi: 10.1163/156853701300063561 google scholar
• Bigler R. S., & Liben, L. S. (2007). Developmental intergroup theory: Explaining and reducing children’s social stereotyping and prejudice. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 162166. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00496.x google scholar
• Bilali, R., Celik, A. B., & Ok, E. (2014). Psychological asymmetry in minority-majority relations at different stages of ethnic conflict. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 43, 253-264. doi: 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2014.09.002 google scholar
• Birnbaum, D., Deeb, I., Segall, G., Ben-Eliyahu, A., & Diesendruck, G. (2010). The development of social essentialism: The case of Israeli children’s inferences about Jews and Arabs. Child Development, 81(3), 757-777. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01432.x google scholar
• Davoodi, T., Cui, Y. K., Clegg, J. M., Yan, F. E., Payir, A., Harris, P. L., & Corriveau, K. H. (2020a). Epistemic justifications for belief in the unobservable: The impact of minority status, Cognition, 200, 104273. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104273 google scholar
• Davoodi, T., Soley, G., Harris, P. L., & Blake, P. (2020b). Essentialization of social categories across development in two cultures. Child Development, 91(1), 163-178. doi: 10.1111/cdev.13209 google scholar
• Deeb, I., Segall, G., Birnbaum, D., Ben-Eliyahu, A., & Diesendruck, G. (2011). Seeing isn’t believing: The effect of intergroup exposure on children’s essentialist beliefs about ethnic categories. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(6), 1139. doi: 10.1037/a0026107 google scholar
• del Rfo, M. F., & Strasser, K. (2011). Chilean children’s essentialist reasoning about poverty. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 29(4), 722-743. doi: 10.1348/2044-835X.002005 google scholar Diesendruck, G., & Haber, L. (2009). God’s categories: The effect of religiosity on children’s teleological and essentialist beliefs about categories. Cognition, 110(1), 100-114. doi: 10.1016/j. cognition.2008.11.001 google scholar
• Diesendruck, G., & haLevi, H. (2006). The role of language, appearance, and culture in children’s social category-based induction. Child Development, 77(3), 539-553. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00889.x google scholar
• Diesendruck, G., Goldfein-Elbaz, R., Rhodes, M., Gelman, S., & Neumark, N. (2013). Cross-cultural differences in children’s beliefs about the objectivity of social categories. Child Development, 84(6), 1906-1917. doi: 10.1111/cdev.12108 google scholar
• Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. New York: Oxford University Press. google scholar
• Gelman, S. A. (2004). Psychological essentialism in children. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(9), 404409. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2004.07.001 google scholar
• Gelman, S. A., Heyman, G. D., & Legare, C. H. (2007). Developmental changes in the coherence of essentialist beliefs about psychological characteristics. Child Development, 78(3), 757-774. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01031.x google scholar
• Gelman, S. A., & Hirschfeld, L. A. (1999). How biological is essentialism. In D. L. Medin & S. Atran (Eds.), Folkbiology (pp. 403-446). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.. google scholar
• Gelman, S. A., & Wellman, H. M. (1991). Insides and essences: Early understandings of the non-obvious. Cognition, 38(3), 213-244. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(91)90007-Q google scholar
• Gil-White, F. J. (2002). The cognition of ethnicity: Native category systems under the field experimental microscope. Field Methods, 14(2), 161-189. doi: 10.1177/1525822X02014002003 google scholar
• Gimenez, M., & Harris, P. L. (2002). Understanding constraints on inheritance: Evidence for biological thinking in early childhood. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 20, 307-324. doi: 10.1348/026151002320620262 google scholar
• Heiphetz, L., Gelman, S. A., & Young, L. L. (2017). The perceived stability and biological basis of religious beliefs, factual beliefs, and opinions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 156, 82-98. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2016.11.015 google scholar
• Hirschfeld, L. A. (1995). The inheritability of identity: Children’s understanding of the cultural biology of race. Child Development, 66, 1418-1437. doi: 10.2307/1131655 google scholar
• Hirschfeld, L.A. (1996). Race in the making: Cognition, culture, and the child’s construction of human kinds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. google scholar
• Hirschfeld, L. A., & Gelman, S. A. (1997). What young children think about the relationship between language variation and social difference. Cognitive Development, 12, 213-238. doi: 10.1016/ S0885-2014(97)90014-9 google scholar
• Hussak, L., & Cimpian, A. (2019). “It Feels Like It’s in Your Body”: How Children in the United States Think About Nationality. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(7), 1153-1168. doi: 10.1037/xge0000567 google scholar
• Inglehart, R., & Norris, P. (2003). Rising tide: Gender equality and cultural change around the world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. google scholar
• Kaya, N. (2009). Forgotten or assimilated? Minorities in the education system of Turkey. London: Minority Rights Group International. Retrieved from http://www.minorityrights.org/?lid=7732. google scholar
• Kinzler, K. D., & Dautel, J. B. (2012). Children’s essentialist reasoning about language and race. Developmental Science, 15(1), 131-138. 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01101.x google scholar
• Kirişci, K., & Winrow, G. M. (1997). The Kurdish question and Turkey: An example of a trans-state ethnic conflict. London: Frank Class. google scholar Konda (September, 2006). Toplumsal Yapı Araştırması: Biz Kimiz? Retrieved from https://konda.com. tr/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2006_09_KONDA_Toplumsal_Yapi.pdf google scholar
• Mandalaywala, T. M., Ranger-Murdock, G., Amodio, D. M., & Rhodes, M. (2019). The nature and consequences of essentialist beliefs about race in early childhood. Child Development, 90(4), e437-e453. doi: 10.1111/cdev.13008 google scholar
• Medin, D. L., & Ortony, A. (1989). Psychological essentialism. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning (pp. 179-195). New York: Cambridge University Press. google scholar
• Pauker, K., Xu, Y., Williams, A., & Biddle, A. M. (2016). Race essentialism and contextual differences in children’s racial stereotyping. Child Development, 87, 1409-1422. doi: 10.1111/cdev.12592 google scholar
• R Core Team (2019). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL http://www.R-project.org/. google scholar
• Rhodes, M., & Gelman, S. A. (2009). A developmental examination of the conceptual structure of animal, artifact, and human social categories across two cultural contexts. Cognitive Psychology, 59(3), 244-274. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2009.05.001 google scholar
• Rhodes, M., Leslie, S. J., &Tworek, C. M. (2012). Cultural transmission of socialessentialism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(34), 13526-13531. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1208951109 google scholar
• Roberts, S. O., & Gelman, S. A. (2016). Can White children grow up to be Black? Children’s reasoning about the stability of emotion and race. Developmental Psychology, 52(6), 887-893. doi: 10.1037/ dev0000132 google scholar
• Rutland A., Killen, M., & Abrams, D. (2010). A new social-cognitive developmental perspective on prejudice: The interplay between morality and group identity. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5, 279-291. doi: 10.1177/1745691610369468 google scholar
• Segall, G., Birnbaum, D., Deeb, I., & Diesendruck, G. (2015). The intergenerational transmission of ethnic essentialism: How parents talk counts the most. Developmental Science, 18(4), 543-555. doi: 10.1111/desc.12235 google scholar
• Smyth, K., Feeney, A., Eidson, R. C., & Coley, J. D. (2017). Development of essentialist thinking about religion categories in Northern Ireland (and the United States). Developmental Psychology, 53(3), 475. doi: 10.1037/dev0000253 google scholar
• Sousa, P., Atran, S., & Medin, D. L. (2002). Essentialism and folk biology: Evidence from Brazil. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2, 195-223. doi: 10.1163/15685370260225099 google scholar
• Taylor, M. G., Rhodes, M., & Gelman, S. A. (2009). Boys will be boys; cows will be cows: Children’s essentialist reasoning about gender categories and animal species. Child Development, 80(2), 461481. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01272.x google scholar
• The UN Refugee Agency (April, 2020). UNHCR Syria Regional Refugee Response - Turkey. Retrieved from https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria/location/113 google scholar
• Tropp, L. R., & Pettigrew, T. F. (2005). Differential relationships between intergroup contact and affective and cognitive dimensions of prejudice. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 1145-1158. doi: 10. 1177/0146167205274854 google scholar
• Waxman, S. R., Medin, D. L., & Ross, N. (2007). Folkbiological reasoning from a cross-cultural developmental perspective: Early essentialist notions are shaped by cultural beliefs. Developmental Psychology, 43, 294-308. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.43.2.294 google scholar