Kate Meinecke
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Valerie Umscheid
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Psychology / LSA
Program: UROPF
Session: Session 5 (2:40pm – 3:30pm)
Authors: Kate Meinecke, Valerie Umscheid
Abstract
Do children think that the traits of bullies versus prosocial kids are persistent into the adulthood? To answer this and many other questions, we interviewed 170 children between the ages of 7-12 over Zoom during between October 2022-January 2023. Prior research has shown that children believed famous villains have a bad true self compared to the prosocial famous heroes presented (Umscheid et al., 2022). The current research examines similar themes of “true self,†except instead of villains, mean and violent bully characters are used, and prosocial “nice†kids are used in place of heroes. In this poster I am looking specifically to see if children believe that the true selves of the characters presented, both antisocial and prosocial, could change over time as the characters grow up. To find this, we told our participants about the actions of one bully and one “nice†kid, and then asked if they believed that the kids will stay as they are or change. Results showed that children believed prosocial characters were more likely to stay the same than the bully characters. Furthermore, when the prosocial kid was presented first, the bully was more likely to stay mean. Our goal is to better understand the social cognitions of kids with social groups, and to learn how we may better be able to help kids in response to bullies.
