Dr. Yarrow Dunham: Processes of Knowledge Acquisition

As a developing child, one of our most important tasks is to make meaning of the world around us. We do it subconsciously, picking up on small minute details of our social environment, collecting them in a mental database, and putting them through a meaning-making process. This is a simplistic way of describing our process of knowledge acquisition. With the help of Dr. Yarrow Dunham, a Harvard-trained, Yale-tenured professor of psychology, we’re provided a nuanced insight into what processes take place in the realm of intergroup social cognition. How do children make sense of socially constructed entities, such as the paper we use as currency and the diplomas that can represent our educational self-worth? How do we determine fairness between in-group and out-group members? And how do culturally specific biases play a role? All of these questions make up just a sliver of what Dr. Dunham is set to investigate. We’ll touch on these topics and more during our conversation.