Biases in niche construction

ABSTRACT

Niche construction theory highlights the active role of organisms in modifying their environment. A subset of these modifications is the developmental niche, which concerns ecological, epistemic, social and symbolic legacies inherited by organisms as resources that scaffold their developmental processes. Since in this theory development is a situated process that takes place in a culturally structured environment, we may reasonably ask if implicit cultural biases may, in some cases, be responsible for maladaptive developmental niches. In this paper we wish to argue for an affirmative answer. In order to do so, we first propose to conceptualize implicit bias as embodied perceptual habits, and then proceed to show that these habits are at least partially responsible for maladaptive developmental niches of children with Down syndrome and autism. With this framework we thus hope to bring together two fields of research that haven’t been explicitly connected: implicit bias and niche construction theory. Linking these two theories may bring benefits both to implicit bias researchers, who can extend this concept to characterize other sets of processes as biased, as well as to niche construction theorists, who will have a useful theoretical tool to diagnose maladaptive features of niches brought about by sociocultural biases.

KEYWORDS:

• Niche construction theory
• implicit bias
• embodied perceptual habits
• developmental niche
• autism
• Down syndrome

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. It is a matter of contention whether implicit attitudes and implicit biases amount to the same thing, and whether unconsciousness is a constitutive mark of implicit biases. For discussion see Brownstein et al. (2019).

2. For an example see the Associative-Propositional Evaluation Model by Gawronski and Bodenhausen (2011).

3. Michelle Maiese (2016) develops some similar ideas with her analysis of how “affective frames” and “habits of mind”, as she terms them, shape our habitual ways of attending to, making sense of, and actively engaging with our surroundings over multiple timescales. See also Colombetti and Krueger (2015) on “bodily-affective styles”.

4. For some examples see Colombetti and Krueger (2015); Tanesini (2022); and Sterelny (2010), on affective, epistemic and cognitive scaffoldings respectively.

5. George was 46 months old at the time of the study, while his typical sister Janet was 22 months old. George’s developmental age was estimated by the researchers as approximately the same as Janet’s.

6. The scale of low, middle and high level cognitive demands comes from the work of Pellegrini et al. (1990) on joint reading activities with children. In their framework low-level demands include observations (“watch me”), demonstrations (“I am reading this now”) and labeling (“this is a tree”); middle-level demands include inference of similarity (“how are they similar?”), sequencing (“first do this, and then that”), clarifications (“which go together?”), etc.; and high-level demands include cause-effect inferences (“why did it happen like this?”), alternatives (“let’s try another way”), conclusions (“why would it end like this?”), planning (“first tell me all you know about the story”), and so on. See Pellegrini et al. (1990) for discussion.

7. This point was raised by an anonymous referee.

8. We here follow terminological preferences of neurodiversity proponents who endorse identity-first language (“autistic persons”) to emphasize the connection between cognitive and emotional styles and selfhood (Pellicano & Stears, 2011).

9. This objection was raised by an anonymous referee.

10. Dasgupta and Greenwald (2001) provide evidence that such exposure impacts one’s performance in a racial IAT in a positive way (i.e., by reducing the difference in reaction time concerning photographs of black and white persons), which led Kang and Banaji (2006) to suggest that an effective intervention against racial biases would be to have more pictures of famous black personalities in offices and households. We believe these measures miss the point, and do not address structural and institutional factors that need to be taken into account in more effective interventions for changing racial biases.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior [Finance Code 001].