As young children navigate their social world, their understanding of social categories become increasingly complex. Decades of research in social cognitive development has provided extensive knowledge about how children think about categories like gender and race. However, this work has largely examined each dimension in isolation. In reality, rather than operating independently, gender and race may intersect to structure children’s social cognition and psychological outcomes. This dissertation investigates the mechanisms that may underlie the development of intersectional social beliefs as well as how these beliefs may impact children’s psychological outcomes. Chapter 2 shows that social hierarchies shape children’s social prototypes. By age four, children already believe that groups with higher social status are more representative of people than lower-status groups. Chapters 3 and 4 investigate how children’s intersectional beliefs may shape their psychological outcomes in brilliance-related contexts—domains that are often marked by pronounced social disparities. Specifically, Chapter 3 examines five- to nine-year-old children’s social preferences for peers who pursue brilliance-required activities. Children’s social preferences are intersectional: with age, children become increasingly likely to prefer White boys and girls of color (i.e., Black and Asian girls) pursuing activities requiring brilliance, whereas this preference does not extend to White girls or boys of color who pursue the same activities. Chapter 4 examines one psychological mechanism (i.e., sense of belonging) that may underlie girls’ lower interest in brilliance-required activities compared to boys, and whether this mechanism varies as a function of children’s own gender and race. Results demonstrate that seven- to eight-year-old girls feel less belonged to and are less interested in brilliance-required activities than boys, a pattern observed among both White and Asian children. Importantly, promoting children’s sense of belonging increased their interest in brilliance-required activities. Taken together, these findings suggest that children begin to think deeply about the intersections of social identities from an early age. Specifically, social hierarchies shape children’s social prototypes that may give rise to intersectional beliefs. These beliefs can have both shared and distinct consequences depending on children’s intersecting gender and racial identities. This research highlights the importance of targeting specific mechanisms across multiple social axes to reduce negative outcomes for children from historically marginalized backgrounds.
