Abstract
Although growing up in stressful conditions can undermine mental abilities, people in harsh environments may develop intact, or even enhanced, social and cognitive abilities for solving problems in high‐adversity contexts (i.e. ‘hidden talents’). We examine whether childhood and current exposure to violence are associated with memory (number of learning rounds needed to memorize relations between items) and reasoning performance (accuracy in deducing a novel relation) on transitive inference tasks involving both violence‐relevant and violence‐neutral social information (social dominance vs. chronological age). We hypothesized that individuals who had more exposure to violence would perform better than individuals with less exposure on the social dominance task. We tested this hypothesis in a preregistered study in 100 Dutch college students and 99 Dutch community participants. We found that more exposure to violence was associated with lower overall memory performance, but not with reasoning performance. However, the main effects of current (but not childhood) exposure to violence on memory were qualified by significant interaction effects. More current exposure to neighborhood violence was associated with worse memory for age relations, but not with memory for dominance relations. By contrast, more current personal involvement in violence was associated with better memory for dominance relations, but not with memory for age relations. These results suggest incomplete transfer of learning and memory abilities across contents. This pattern of results, which supports a combination of deficits and ‘hidden talents,’ is striking in relation to the broader developmental literature, which has nearly exclusively reported deficits in people from harsh conditions. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/e4ePmSzZsuc.
Highlights
It is well‐established that growing up under conditions of social and economic adversity can undermine children's development, cog‐ nitive abilities, and health (Duncan, Magnuson, & Votruba‐Drzal, 2017; Nelson, Fox, & Zeanah, 2014)
Far less recognized is an emerging body of research showing that people from high‐adversity backgrounds may develop enhanced social and cognitive abilities that are adapted to stressful conditions
Current involvement in violence was negatively correlated with the num‐ ber of rounds needed to memorize dominance relations (τ = −0.12, p = 0.048, BF10 = 2.69), but not with age relations (τ = 0.06, p = 0.37, BF01 = 5.49)
Summary
It is well‐established that growing up under conditions of social and economic adversity can undermine children's development, cog‐ nitive abilities, and health (Duncan, Magnuson, & Votruba‐Drzal, 2017; Nelson, Fox, & Zeanah, 2014). Far less recognized is an emerging body of research showing that people from high‐adversity backgrounds may develop enhanced social and cognitive abilities that are adapted to stressful conditions | 2 of 13 as the ‘specialization hypothesis’; Ellis, Bianchi, Griskevicius, & Frankenhuis, 2017; Frankenhuis & de Weerth, 2013) Documenting these ‘hidden talents’—and redesigning teaching, learning, and assessment processes to capitalize on these abilities in school—is a potential tool for improving the academic performance of students from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Using these abilities as building blocks for success may boost confidence, motivation, and performance in people who suffer from stigma and hardship. We envision an assess‐ ment battery that measures these hidden talents, which can be used to benefit high‐adversity youth in education, jobs, and civic life (Ellis et al, 2017)
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