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Prejudice in Childhood

Prejudice is defined as a negative attitude toward someone based on group membership, such as gender, race, and ethnicity, without consideration for the individual's personality, traits, or abilities. Developmental research on prejudice has shown that certain forms of prejudice emerge during the preschool period, such as gender stereotypes, while other forms do not manifest until adolescence, such as cultural or ethnic stereotypes. Fortunately, children and adolescents have strong beliefs about equality and fairness, and with effective interventions, children are capable of changing their negative attitudes about others, and they find it easier than do adults.

Measuring Prejudice

There are different ways to measure prejudice in childhood. Some methods are explicit and involve direct questions about gender, race, or ethnicity. For example, researchers have evaluated whether children assign negative (e.g., dirty) or positive (e.g., smart) traits to others based solely on group membership (Aboud & Amato, 2001). These studies have found that prejudice emerges during the preschool period and declines around 9 years of age. This is because young children often assign positive traits to their own group and negative traits to the other group, while older children assign positive and negative traits to both groups. Another explicit measure involves interviewing children about how they evaluate situations in which gender or race is used as a factor to make decisions, such as exclusion and friendship. Recent studies based on social-cognitive domain theory have shown that with age, children use race and gender as reasons for making decisions about friendship and exclusion (Killen & Stangor, 2001). Young children in the preschool period do not focus on race, and with age, children use race to make decisions about social relationships.

Prejudice can also be measured using implicit methods, in ways that are not obvious to those making the judgments. This method evaluates whether individuals hold negative implicit biases. Social psychologists have found evidence of implicit biases in adults that often operate at a subconscious level (Dovidio, Brigham, Johnson, & Gaertner, 1996). While results supporting the presence of implicit biases in adult samples have been robust, few known studies have investigated whether children hold implicit biases. Studies testing implicit biases in children have used ambiguous situations to assess children's racial attitudes. Evaluations of ambiguous situations can detect implicit biases because the child is not asked explicitly about race but is only asked to describe what happened in a picture. There are mixed findings on implicit biases in childhood. Some studies have shown that children hold implicit racial biases when making decisions about cross-race friendships. Other studies have shown that implicit biases do not emerge until adolescence.

Factors Influencing the Development of Prejudice

There are different theories about where prejudice comes from. Most people believe that parents are responsible for “passing down” prejudice, especially racial prejudice, to their children. Studies, however, have shown that children's attitudes are not direct copies of their parents' attitudes. Prejudice does not stem solely from parental beliefs. Instead, attitudes toward others are shaped by multiple sources. Peers can influence attitudes about group members. The power of peers in shaping intergroup attitudes increases in adolescence, when the importance of social group membership intensifies. The media can also influence intergroup attitudes by presenting group members in negative, stereotypic ways. In addition, children are cognitive beings and make their own judgments about others based on their observations, reflections, and inferences about events in the world (Bennett, Barrett, Lyons, & Sani, 1998; Bigler, Jones, & Lobliner, 1997). In addition to theories that attribute the origin of prejudice to socialization agents and to social cognitive development, some scholars have argued that prejudice has an evolutionary basis (Fishbein, 2002). Humans, according to these theorists, are predisposed to make distinctions between the in-group and the out-group in order to aid in survival. Unfortunately, this predisposition is often maladaptive for successful human societal interactions.

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