How do adopted and donor-conceicved kids reason about nature vs. nurture? They hold *reduced* genetic-essentialist beliefs relative to traditionally-conceived kids, according to our new paper (in press at Dev Psych)! I’m really proud of this one. A🧵… osf.io/preprints/ps... - ThreadSky

rebeccaperetzlange.bsky.social • 138 days ago

How do adopted and donor-conceicved kids reason about nature vs. nurture?
They hold *reduced* genetic-essentialist beliefs relative to traditionally-conceived kids, according to our new paper (in press at Dev Psych)! I’m really proud of this one. A🧵…
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/3e8rj_v1

Comments

rebeccaperetzlange.bsky.social•138 days ago

We recruited 4-8yos who were themselves adopted or donor-conceived (thru an egg or sperm donor) and so have personally experienced the distinction between biological & environmental parenting influences. We also ran a control group of traditionally-conceived kids. (“ADC” & “TC”).

rebeccaperetzlange.bsky.social•138 days ago

Children completed 5 trials of an Adoption Task, focusing 5 personal traits: Hair color, spoken language, interests, intelligence, and personality (quiet vs loud parents as featured here). Their parents also completed a genetic-essentialism scale.

rebeccaperetzlange.bsky.social•138 days ago

We found that the odds of an essentialist response were 3x greater in the TC than ADC kids! ADC & TC kids' parents did not differ in essentialism, suggesting that kids reached their distinct conclusions on their own, thru tracking the respective influences of nature & nurture.

rebeccaperetzlange.bsky.social•138 days ago

Also, w/ age, kids’ responses diverged across the 5 trials as their ideas became more trait-specific (i.e., kids increasingly distinguished between hair color as genetic and spoken language as not). Crucially, this differentiation was more pronounced in the ADC than the TC kids!

rebeccaperetzlange.bsky.social•138 days ago

Nature & nurture are confounded for TC kids, but decoupled for ADC kids. We argue that this helps ADC kids form their causal theories. Just as scientists have long leveraged adoption to disentangle nature from nurture, so too might ADC kids themselves!

rebeccaperetzlange.bsky.social•138 days ago

On top of its basic sci implications, I'm proud that this paper also advances research on ADC kids by centering ADC voices (as the queer parent of a donor-conceived kid & an egg donor to queer friends 🏳️‍🌈). I’d love to work w researchers who are ADC themselves in the future!

cloudatalanta.bsky.social•73 days ago

Thoughts on if this could be caused by the way society interacts with TC or ADC kids? “You look like mom” vs “you act like mom” etc

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply