How does prejudice develop in children? - Chapter 7

Why is awareness of social categories important?

As said before, adults use stereotypes to classify and order their world. Children form categories on the same basis as adults and they also do this to simplify the world. But children have more limited mental abilities and will therefore need categorization even more. Categorization lets children free some mental resources for other tasks. Life without categories would be chaotic and inconvenient categorization helps people develop a picture of the social world. Children see that all people differ and if they did not their world views would be inaccurate. Some children who noticed this will be prejudiced and others will not. Researchers who study children’s awareness divide awareness in two types: explicit and implicit. The first one is explicit awareness and the second one implicit awareness. Explicit awareness means conscious awareness to social groups. Children may also be aware of conscious groups before they learn to speak. This is implicit awareness.

How does implicit awareness of social groups work?

Before children start producing words about categories, they are aware of groups of social categories. They can discriminate between gender, age and race. Even infants can discriminate between social categories. Babies were shown a certain picture a couple of times until they got familiar with this picture. Some of the babies then got to see another picture with a person from another race or gender than the first picture. Those babies spend more time looking at this picture than at a picture of a person from the same group as the first one. This means that babies see differences between groups. Race was not a meaningful category for them. From a certain age, however, children start differentiating between races. Infants also differentiate between races and also between physical attractiveness. Research found that infants look more at attractive faces than non-attractive faces. This might stem from the perception that something beautiful is something good. 

What is explicit awareness?

By the age of 2,5 years children have learned how to use gender labels appropriately. One research gave children a set of photos to put together and they were free to make their categories. White 7 year-olds usually used ethnicity to sort the photos. When asked specific tasks, like sorting the photos to play together, they used gender as the category which to sort the photos in. So the context in which one sorts the photographs influences the way in which children categorize them.

One way to examine categorization in children is the doll-technique. Examiners give a child two dolls, one white and one black. They then ask which doll looks like a white child. Three year-olds don’t know the correct answer, but four year-olds do usually know the correct answer. Preschool years are critical in the development of awareness of social groups based on race. That is only between Black and White. Asians and Latinos are differentiated at a later age. This might be because children might not see perceptually obvious features distinguishing White people, Asians and Latinos. Between the age of five and seven children learn to distinguish between White and Asian people. Identifying Latinos was more difficult. Between the age of four and nine children learned how to distinguish between Latinos and White people.

What are the patterns of prejudice development?

Recognizing different social categories does not mean that one prefers one category over the other. Children add values to social categories and some call this category preference, others call this prejudice. Category preference means that children prefer one group over the other. This does, however, not mean a derogation of other groups. People sometimes think that children are prejudiced or discriminate. They sometimes exclude other children from activities. But it’s hard to say if it are negative attitudes that underlie this type of behaviour. Even when children verbally express prejudice they don’t know truly what they are saying or the effect it has on the children they say it to.

How does the development of racial prejudice work?

It is sometimes hard to examine children on their prejudice. The most commonly method used on children’s attitudes about race is the Preschool Racial Attitude Measure (PRAM). Children are forced to choose one of two options here. They usually have to choose from photographs or listen to a story and answer questions based on the story. A problem with this method is that by choosing one category over the other children do not automatically reject the other category. If a child chooses the white child it does not mean that he or she rejects the black child. Maybe a child likes both children, but just likes one more than the other. If you use a continuous measure of prejudice you can overcome this problem. One of these measures is the social distance scale. One of the questions from this scale is ‘Would you feel comfortable living next to a Black family?’ Children can choose from five answers, ranging from yes, definitely and no, definitely. The child is not forced to choose from two alternatives. When asked about it with a continuous scale white children preferred other white children the most, but only slightly more than other ethnic groups. So they did not just have negative attitudes about children from other ethnic groups.

Another measure is looking how often children interact with other ethnicities. The assumption is that children do not interact with those they dislike. Sometimes children are also asked how much they like to interact with every classmate.

White children begin to develop positive and negative racial attitudes between the ages of three and four. Racial prejudice reaches the highest level at the age of five-seven years old. Children who were five gave the highest racial stereotypical responses while children of eight and nine years gave the lowest stereotypical responses. Prejudice seems to decline after the age of nine.

How does the development of racial attitudes work?

Black children begin to develop racial attitudes at the age of three to four years. At the age of three, black children’s attitudes were either pro-Black or unbiased. There has no typical ethnic attitude been found between the ages of five and seven years in black children. Some had unbiased attitudes while some had pro-black or pro-White attitudes. Between the ages of seven to ten years the pro-White bias disappears and children are more pro-Black. This does not mean, however, that they dislike White people. They just become neutral to them. The children who used to be pro-White become neutral those who were neutral become pro-Black and those who were pro-Black become even more pro-Black. Black people show more variability in their social preference patterns than White people. This is maybe because black children have more complex views of racism than white children.

Children from other ethnicities show the same pattern of attitudes as the black children. Biracial children reflect both black and white attitudes.

Some researchers don’t want to assess young children’s attitudes directly. Children are easily distracted or just don’t want to answer your question. Researchers who observe children’s behaviour found results that contradict the previous part about the development of racial attitudes in children. That research showed that preschool children preferred to play with somebody from their own ethnicity. Observation studies, however, show that preschool girls preferred to play with girls their own race and preschool boys showed a pro-White preference. Contradictory results were also found for older children.

How does the development of gender-based prejudice work?

Toddlers begin to develop gender stereotypes before they can say ‘boy’ or ‘girl’. Children of 2,5 years old know what their own gender is and what the gender of others is. This does not mean that they understand the whole idea of gender. They don’t express gender roles until the age of nine. When they are two they already know which toys are for girls and which are for boys. In Western cultures children start to show a same-sex preference around the age of three. In different cultures same-sex preference occurs earlier or later in life. In cultures where mixed-sex groups are more common, homosociality, same-sex preference occurs later in life.

When children get older a shift occurs. When 4,5- year old children were asked which group –boys, girls, tomboys or sissies- they disliked the most, they said tomboys. When 8,5-year old children were asked the same question, they said sissies. This is because older children value male characteristics more than female characteristics in both sexes. During pre-adolescents, boys and girls liked gender-role traditional girls the most. This is not surprising, because prejudice becomes less prevalent as children become romantically interested in one another.

What are the processes of prejudice development?

What are the inner state theories?

Inner state theories think that prejudice is caused by something inside the person. Like said before, people with the authoritarian personality are more likely to hold prejudiced views. People with this personality had to obey strict rules when they were young and were punished severely. The child experienced psychological conflict. On the one hand he hated his parents and wanted to rebel, but on the other hand the child was afraid to rebel. Because of this conflict the authoritarian personality arises.

Punitive child-rearing practices lead to a conforming personality and this child sees the world as a threatening place. The child will seek security and control. Usually someone can find this in authoritarian political ideologies. In contrast, tolerant child-rearing practises lead to an independent personality and the people see the world as a safe place. They adopt social ideologies that emphasize personal freedom.

Some scientists, however, reject the role of childhood experiences as a source of authoritarianism. They think that authoritarian beliefs are adopted by socialization. This occurs in adolescence, because young children can’t understand the issues on which authoritarianism is based. There are two main sources of social learning. The first one is parents. Parents teach children to obey them and to obey authority figures. The second source is personal experience.

What are the cognitive development theories?

These theories think that children’s ability to understand the nature of social groups and their relations influence their intergroup attitudes. Because cognitive abilities change intergroup attitudes also change. These theories suggest that prejudice may be unavoidable at certain stages of one’s development but that it is not permanent and may decrease or disappear as the child grows older.

Piaget’s theory is one of the most popular theories of child learning processes. The theory proposes that children move through four stage of cognitive development:

1. Sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years): Children can’t internally represent people and therefore can’t hold attitudes about people and there’s no prejudice.
2. Preoperational stage (2-7 years): Children focus on themselves and can’t take someone else’s perspective and they only focus on one piece of information.
3. Concrete operational stage ( 7-11): Thoughts are logic and systematic, but are concrete and not abstract.
4. Formal operational stage (12 and above): In this stage the child starts to think abstractly.

According to Piaget developing prejudice goes through some of these stages. When children are four to seven years old they think everybody is the same. When children are seven to ten years old they focus on their social groups and they conceptualize other groups in terms of how they differ from their own groups. This also comes with positive attitudes towards their group and negative attitudes towards other groups. Piaget’s theory does not completely match the previously discussed findings. Piaget thinks that prejudice reaches its highest levels at the age of seven to twelve years, whereas research says that it is five years and that it declines after the age of eight years.

Aboud revised Piaget’s theory and came with his own theory. He thinks that different children can proceed through three stages at different ages. It all depends on one’s cognitive development. People might react differently towards people who are not their own ethnicity, because they have stranger distress. This means that anyone who looks different than who the child knows is seen as a stranger and the child fears this person. So the first stage of prejudice does not take the form of anger, but a form of fear and is expressed as social exclusion. In the second stage, children notice the similarities and differences between themselves and others. People start to categorize others according to social group membership. Children start to exaggerate the differences between their own group and other groups and this is the beginning of prejudice. Eventually children will become aware of similarities between their group and other groups and they might become more cognitively flexible and will prejudice less. In the third stage, children don’t just categorize on social group membership, but also on people’s individual qualities.

What is social learning?

The social learning theory can explain many aspects of social development in terms of three learning processes. The first one is direct teaching. That means that an individual is rewarded for behaving in a certain way. The second is observational teaching. This is imitating the attitudes or behaviours of a parent, peer or role model. The third one is vicarious learning. This means that the child sees someone else be punished or praised for a certain behaviour and learn from this.

What is the influence of parents?

Direct teaching of prejudice does not occur a lot: parents rarely discuss prejudice with their children. But when parents are members of hate groups, direct teaching of prejudice will occur. Schooling can also be a source of direct teaching of prejudice. Some people put their children on ‘Aryan-only’ schools or let them be home schooled so they won’t be corrupted by minority groups. Teaching of prejudice usually occurs directly in extremely racist families, but the most teaching of prejudice is indirect.

When examining prejudice, researchers examine the correlation of children’s attitudes with that of their parents. Usually, there is no correlation found. How can this be? Well, the effect of parental prejudice may operate through other factors. Prejudice can have an impact on issues like tolerance and political beliefs. Parents influence their children’s prejudice rather indirectly than directly. Mothers usually influence their children’s views on race and weight and fathers influence views on sex-role attitudes and homosexuality.

What is the influence of media?

Children can also learn things from the television or other media. People in books or series are usually portrayed in gender stereotypic roles. Also, some ethnicity groups are not often portrayed on the television and children might think that these groups are therefore not really important.

What is the developmental intergroup theory?

The developmental intergroup theory holds that the development of prejudice is a by-product of the cognitive development through which children come to understand the world. According to this theory the development of prejudice proceeds in three stages. In the first stage, children develop rules for group categorization. They focus on the physical characteristics, like skin colour and can’t focus on abstract characteristics. Also, children look at how adults classify other groups and they usually use the same system as adults. Also, children learn from society how to group people.

How to categorize?

When children have made these categories, they can assign people to them. They can start doing this when they realize that one’s membership in a category does not change over time. The complexity of the categories children form can change over time. When they just focused on just one single piece of information, they may later focus on more pieces of information to form categories.

When categorization is happening, the development of stereotypes and prejudices is also activated. Four factors contribute to this process:

• Essentialism is the belief that all members of a category have similar psychological characteristics and that these characteristics are unchanging. 
• Favoritism is the way in which children attribute positive traits to their own groups, although they do not necessarily derogate outgroups.
• Explicit teaching, but direct teaching of the prejudice is rare.
• Implicit teaching, in which children notice that, for instance, most teachers are female, or the way adults respond to members of social groups. 

At a certain point in time, there will be a drop-off in prejudice according to this theory. Not all researchers agree with this drop-off. Some say that real change occurs in someone’s social ability and one sees that other groups are not so bad after all. Others say that this drop-off is not a real change, but that children might try to control their prejudice because they think society thinks it’s bad.

How to reduce prejudice in children?

What is school desegregation?

Researchers used to think that desegregating school would lead to a less prejudiced environment between children. Desegregation, however, is no integration. If you just ‘drop’ White and Black people at one place, they will not just improve their relationship with each other. You have to integrate these groups. If you really want to reduce prejudice the groups must have the same status at school, the children must get to know each other and the groups must work with each other. This brings a lot of positive intergroup effects and even an influence on the long-term effects. People who attended desegregated schools, had friends from other social groups later in life.

Cooperative learning are a number of educational techniques used to create group learning environments which implement the necessary contact conditions as part of the educational process day-to-day. 

How to use educational interventions?

Another way to help intergroup relations is education. Children should learn about the characteristics of other groups in society because ignorance is a major cause of prejudice. Anti-bias education is also used to educate children. This type of education teaches children things about bias and shows them how it affects people. Multicultural education is based on the idea that inaccurate information about other groups lead to intergroup anxiety and the use of stereotypes. Anti-bias education is often used to provide students with a heightened awareness of institutional racism and the skills to reduce it in their contacts.