Scientist Spotlight: Q+A with Susan Gelman, PhD

In lay-friendly terms, what’s the big question your work is addressing?

I’ve always been fascinated by the question of what young children are thinking and how they view the world. My work addresses two interrelated questions:

• What concepts and theories do young children construct to organize their knowledge and beliefs about the world?
• What is the role of language in this process? 

Experience is complex, constantly changing, and multi-layered, and children are hard at work trying to make sense of it all. They form categories and generate causal explanations to explain and predict the world around them. How do they do this, and what does this suggest about human cognition more generally?

What scholars’ work, recent papers, or recent discoveries have gotten you most excited?

I have been tremendously excited by work that applies cognitive development to issues that are socially meaningful, even urgent in the world today. As a field, we know that children construct rich conceptual systems starting in infancy, and that these include social categories—concepts for types of people. We also know that for adults, social categories can be a source of stereotyping, discrimination, and prejudice. But there's a yawning gap between these two observations. How does the child go from concepts to stereotypes? How do categories of people become so morally loaded? A number of scholars today are tackling these important questions, by leaning into the complexity of the problem, to work out, in detail, how cognitive biases, diverse identities, and cultural input jointly shape a knowledge system. Some examples include:

• Rhodes, M., Cardarelli, A., & Leslie, S. J. (2020). Asking young children to “do science” instead of “be scientists” increases science engagement in a randomized field experiment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(18), 9808-9814.
• Bian, L., Leslie, S. J., & Cimpian, A. (2017). Gender stereotypes about intellectual ability emerge early and influence children’s interests. Science, 355(6323), 389-391.
• Olson, K. R., & Gülgöz, S. (2018). Early findings from the transyouth project: Gender development in transgender children. Child Development Perspectives, 12(2), 93-97.
• Sullivan, J. N., Eberhardt, J. L., & Roberts, S. O. (2021). Conversations about race in Black and White US families: Before and after George Floyd’s death. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(38), e2106366118.

What question do you wish more people were asking/working on in your area/subdiscipline?

Much of my career has focused on examining psychological essentialism—that is, the idea that categories have a real, underlying true nature that all members share (e.g., all tigers have an innate, immutable “tiger essence”). Although we now know much about the conditions that foster essentialism and lead to some of its negative consequences (such as racial stereotyping or interethnic hostilities), we know much less about the conditions that may reduce essentialism or blunt its negative consequences. I think this is an incredibly important question for the future.

What are you working on now?

In one set of ongoing projects, we are studying how children understand subtle perspective shifts in language signaled by pronouns. The capacity to shift perspectives is woven into the fabric of the world’s languages, by means of “generic” pronouns that allow speakers to reframe their individual perspective as standing in for a broader perspective that is shared with others (e.g., from “me” to “we”; e.g., “We need to consider others’ feelings”). Recent work from my lab has found that these “generic” pronouns emerge early in development and systematically appear when expressing norms and making meaning from difficult experiences. We are currently examining whether shifting from individually focused pronouns to generic pronouns may convey fundamental messages to child listeners, as well as how these pronouns are expressed in unrelated languages. 

Another ongoing project that I'm very excited about is being funded by the National Science Foundation through the EHR Core Research program, examining how children ages 5–12 understand viral transmission. My team and I are examining how elementary-school children understand invisible biological processes (such as what happens to viruses inside the body), and how they explain health disparities corresponding to social categories (e.g., young vs. old; rich vs. poor). We are also designing and testing a home-based instructional intervention for teaching children key concepts about viral disease. Another component of this project is a collaboration with the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, to design an exhibit for young children to teach them about viruses, including covid-19. I am grateful to David Menendez, PhD, and Danielle Labotka, PhD, two postdocs in my lab, for their important work on this project.

What do you wish you knew when you were first starting off as a new PhD?

I wish I had better understood that failures and disappointments can be learning opportunities. The academic life entails a lot of rejections, and initially I found these very discouraging. But over the years, I’ve come to reframe these to ask: What can I learn from this, and how can I do better next time? However, I’m not sure anyone could have simply told me this as a new PhD—I think I had to learn this for myself through personal experience.

The other point I should mention is that back when I got my PhD, it was not unusual to go straight into an academic position, and that was the case for me. What this meant was that there was such a tremendous amount that I did not yet know about being a professor (including how to write a grant, teach a class, write a theory paper, supervise grad students…). Fortunately, I had caring and dedicated mentors to guide me through my pretenure years. This has given me a tremendous appreciation for the importance of mentoring faculty—the need doesn’t stop when one gets a PhD.