Granted: Shedding Light on How Kids Understand Identity
Catherine Fortin '25, Eloise Shrewsberry '26, and Max Friedmann '24 interview children at a park in Philadelphia as part of their work in Professor Ryan Lei's psychology lab.
Details
What do kids believe about race and gender? Professor Ryan Lei’s NSF-backed research helps uncover answers and trains students to be researchers along the way. This is Granted, Haverford’s series on the impact of federal funding.
Associate Professor of Psychology Ryan Lei
Source of funding: Two grants from the National Science Foundation
Amount: $628,630 and $296,325
About my work: I explore how children come to regard social categories, such as race and gender, as overlapping rather than separate. Already by age 4, children are overlapping race and gender in meaningful ways that help guide how they think about different kinds of people. I want to learn more about the developmental process by which that occurs. Two NSF grants have supported our research into both that phenomenon across the lifespan–one focused on kids and one focused on racial biases in AI imagery (with Associate Professor of Computer Science Alvin Grissom II).
The grants have enabled us to hire some 50 students over the past several years as research assistants. They've been a mix of rising seniors and juniors, though occasionally a rising sophomore will join us. In addition to conducting interviews with kids at a park in Philly, they've learned concrete data analysis skills and, crucially, how to present findings. In reflecting on her time in our lab, one student summarized the research process as “organized chaos,” which sounds about right to me!
Ravenel Davis '22: This experience challenged me to think critically about how children perceive the social world and gave me research skills and knowledge that continue to shape my work as a PhD student in Human Development at Cornell University. I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to engage in such meaningful research as an undergraduate and to have received such strong mentoring and hands-on guidance throughout the process.
Lizy Szanton '22: Federal grants allowed me to collect data to test original research questions and to present our research at national conferences. Both skills were instrumental in preparing me for graduate school and a career in research. Attending Haverford, rather than an R1 institution, gave me a unique chance to engage directly in the research process alongside a faculty mentor, and I hope future students are granted this same opportunity!
Naomi Faber BMC '24: Projects like this allowed me to fully understand the research process, and most vitally how to quantitatively analyze data through software such as RStudio. My skills in RStudio and quantitative analysis is a large reason as to why I was hired to my current position (at the Max Planck Institute in Germany) and I still use many of these skills in my work life. I truly believe I would not have been hired here if I did not have the previous experiences that my work in Dr. Lei's lab offered me.
Federal grants can be life-changing for faculty, students, and those who benefit from their research. Granted, a series about federally funded research, showcases the sort of projects that need your financial support to offset recent, unplanned cuts in government funding. Learn more about how to support research at Haverford.
