Developmentalists study everyone—young and old, rich and poor, of every ethnicity, background, sexual orientation, culture, and nation.

One reason to study people of all kinds is to combat the human inclination to think that anyone who is different is also deficient, i.e., lacking in something that is important for a good life. We are amused when young girls say, “Boys stink,” or their male classmates say, “Girls are stupid,” but adults have the same tendency: to judge people unlike themselves as inferior.

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For example, although males and females are similar in almost every trait, humans tend to look for sex differences, not similarities, and then to make sexist judgments. Most research finds far more similarities than differences between the sexes. One of the very few proven gender differences is that women are more tenderhearted and men more sexually driven (Hyde, 2014). If you are male, do you think that women are weak because they are too emotional; if you are female, do you think men are too obsessed with sex? If you answer yes, how human of you. And how wrong.

Negative judgments are too readily made about people who raise their children differently or who believe in an unfamiliar religion. Have you heard people criticize teenagers, middle-aged adults, or senior citizens? People tend to be critical of whatever age group is not their own.

The human tendency to observe differences and then conclude that people are inferior if they are unlike the observer is called the difference-equals-deficit error. Too quickly and without thought, differences are assumed to be problems (Akhtar & Jaswal, 2013).

The importance of accepting diversity is apparent when considering sexual orientation. Most teenagers are powerfully attracted to members of the other sex, but some—fewer than 1 teenager in 20—are attracted to people of their own sex (Brakefield et al., 2014). Same-sex attraction does not necessarily become sexual behavior, and even attraction is in dispute, as explained in Chapter 16. Here we use sexual orientation to illustrate a difference that was once assumed to be a deficit.

This perceived deficit led school bullies to target classmates thought to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) (Juvonen & Graham, 2014), and many LGBT teenagers themselves felt inferior. As a result, LGBT teenagers committed suicide at a much higher rate than did their heterosexual peers (Herek, 2010).

Over time, however, activism, scientific data, and other factors combined to cause a dramatic change in the culture. In the 1970s, psychiatrists and psychologists declared, “Homosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, stability, reliability” (Conger, 1975, p. 633), and by 2014, same-sex marriage—forbidden in every U.S. state before 2004—became legal in more than 30 U.S. states and in 17 other nations.

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As this difference is less assumed to be a deficit, serious depression and crippling anxiety among LGBT youth has become less common. This is true generally, as well as within each family and community, although certainly there are some areas and families that reject such teens. Their rate of psychological problems is half as high in jurisdictions with policies that indicate acceptance (e.g., laws against hate crimes) compared to communities where same-sex attraction is still considered a deficit (Hatzenbuehler, 2014).

To include “all kinds of people” requires that researchers study children of many cultures, ethnicities, and races. Yet each of these three terms is often confused, by scientists as well as non-scientists.

Culture, ethnicity, and race are social constructions, which means that they are created by society. Social constructions are powerful, affecting thoughts and behavior (as evident with people’s ideas regarding sexual orientation), but since they arise from society, they can be changed by society. Because the study of development focuses on change over time, it is crucial that the fluidity and distinct meaning of each of these words be understood.

For social scientists, culture is “the system of shared beliefs, conventions, norms, behaviors, expectations and symbolic representations that persist over time and prescribe social rules of conduct” (Bornstein et al., 2011, p. 30). Culture is far more than eating certain foods or practicing certain rituals; it is a powerful social construction.

Each family, community, and college has a particular culture. For instance, Jamaicans in the United States are said to be tri-cultural (Jamaican, Black, American) (Ferguson et al., 2014). In any one person several cultures may clash.

Furthermore, individuals within each culture sometimes rebel against their culture’s expected “beliefs, conventions, norms, behaviors.” Cultural influences must be recognized, but not slavishly: Culture is powerful, but also fluid and changing.

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To appreciate that culture is a matter of beliefs and values, not superficial differences, consider language. Of course, people speak distinct languages, but that in itself is not a cultural difference. However, among some English-speaking groups in the United States, linguistic proficiency and independent thinking are encouraged. In families in those groups, children are encouraged to talk freely, and when they do, the adults listen approvingly. In other groups, a prime value is that each child learn respect for parents, and, by extension, for every adult: Children should never interrupt an adult conversation.

One of my East Indian students remembered:

My mom was outside on the porch talking to my aunt. I decided to go outside; I guess I was being nosey. While they were talking I jumped into their conversation which was very rude. When I realized what I did it was too late. My mother slapped me in my face so hard that it took a couple of seconds to feel my face again.

[C., personal communication]

Notice that my student continues to reflect her culture; she labels her own behavior “nosey” and “very rude.” She later wrote that she expects children to be seen but not heard and that her own son makes her “very angry” when he interrupts.

As in this case, cultural values, learned in childhood, tend to persist even when the overall culture has shifted. Culture is not a straightjacket, however. In fact, many parents (including many of Asian ancestry) allow their children more freedom of expression than their parents allowed them. And many parents who have been in North America all their lives nonetheless teach their children not to interrupt adults.

People of an ethnic group share certain attributes, almost always including ancestral heritage and usually national origin, religion, and language (Whitfield & McClearn, 2005). Ethnic group is not the same as cultural group: People of a particular ethnicity need not share a culture (compare people of Irish descent in Ireland and in Illinois), and some cultures include people of several ethnic groups (consider British culture).

Ethnicity is a social construction, affected by the social context. For everyone, ethnic identity is strengthened if (1) other members of the same group are nearby, and (2) other groups consider the person an outsider. Thus, ethnicity depends partly on context.

For example, people born in Africa who are longtime residents of North America typically consider themselves African, unless they are with many other African-born people. Then they might consider themselves by region (e.g. West African) or nation (Nigerian). However, African-born people living in their home country usually identify with a more specific ethnic group, such as the Ibo, Hausa, or Yoruba in Nigeria or the Kikuyo, Luhya, and Luo in Kenya.

Similar particular identities are evident everywhere: Ethnic identity becomes more specific and more salient (Sicilian, not just Italian; South Korean, not just East Asian) under certain circumstances. Many Americans are puzzled by distant civil wars (e.g., in Syria, or Sri Lanka, or the Ukraine) because people who look alike seem to be bitter enemies. However, those on opposing sides see many ethnic differences between them.

Physical appearance is sometimes a marker for ethnicity. The most visible example is skin color, often taken to indicate race. However, race is also a social construction—and a misleading one. There are reasons to abandon the term as well as reasons to keep it, as the following explains.

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Some social scientists believe that when studying “all kinds of people,” differences in socioeconomic status (SES) are more potent than cultural or ethnic differences. SES affects every moment of development, from whether or not a zygote is conceived (rates of sexual activity and contraception vary by SES) to when a person dies (wealthy people live longer).

Like culture, ethnicity, and race, SES is a complicated category. Income is part of socioeconomic status, but only part: For children, their neighborhood and their parents’ level of education is often more influential. This is reflected when people speak of social class, as in “the shrinking middle class” or “working class values.” Such phrases imply habits and attitudes as much as income (Stephens et al., 2012).

Consider a U.S. family comprised of an infant, an unemployed mother, and a father who earns $18,000 a year. Their SES would be low if the wage earner were an illiterate dishwasher living in an urban slum, but it would be high if the wage earner were a PhD student living on campus and teaching part-time.

However, when governments categorize people they rely almost exclusively on income. The U.S. federal poverty line is based primarily on food cost and family size. That standard was set in 1965 and is still used, although economists find that shelter and medical costs are better indicators of income adequacy than food. According to 2014 federal cutoffs, a household of three people with a combined annual income under $19,790 (in Alaska, $24,730) is officially poor.

Policies and practices regarding poverty vary from nation to nation. In the United States, the gap between rich and poor, and between young and old, has increased in the past three decades (Lowrey, 2014) (see Figure 1.3). That has resulted in increased disparities in health, education, and neighborhood between those at the top and bottom.

For example, the life expectancy gap between the rich and poor has widened in the United States. Wealthy people live about six years longer than they did thirty years ago, but poor people die at almost the same age, on average, as their parents did.

SES affects almost every aspect of life in every nation and in every region of each nation, as illustrated in Visualizing Development (see the inside cover). That fact is known to everyone who examines the data, although not everyone agrees about the specifics or the implications (Chambers et al., 2014).

All humans are the same. Yet as sex, culture, ethnicity, and SES make clear, every group is different. Furthermore, genetically each individual is unique. Is that a paradox, a dilemma, or a challenge? How general, and how specific, should developmentalists be? A leading scholar wrote:

Psychologists and psychiatrists are fond of writing sentences such as “individuals with the short allele of the serotonin transporter [the 5-HTTLPR gene mentioned earlier] are vulnerable to depression if they experience past stressors.” … I suggest that they should more often write sentences such as “women with a European pedigree possessing the short allele of the serotonin transporter who live in a large city far from their family, and grew up as a later born child in an economically disadvantaged family are at risk for depression.”

[Kagan, 2011, p. 111]

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Kagan’s suggestion is meant to be an exaggeration: The right balance between generalizations and specifics is not obvious, but Kagan insists that developmental conclusions should never be “contextually naked” (2011, p. 112). In other words, variations in background and circumstances should always be considered. Not only are neither nature nor nurture determinative, but also making simple predictions, across or within groups, is a mistake.

Both dismissing the impact of SES, culture, and so on, and taking it too much to heart, are mistakes. One of my students did the former, saying, “That’s just a statistic, it doesn’t apply to me,” and another did the latter, saying “Now that I know all the risks for a woman like me, I will never have children.” I tried to dissuade them both.

Remember that differences are not necessarily deficits, racial and ethnic categories are social constructions, and income does not trump education. Yet all differences, categories, and incomes have an effect on everyone, an effect that is neither intractable nor irrelevant. Effects change over time. This leads to the third aspect of our definition.

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