Children: Stereotypes and Prejudice

Origins of Prejudice

Developmental and social psychologists have suspected that prejudice in children may originate from the child's early ability to categorize the social world. Children develop the ability to recognize characteristic features of people from their own group and other groups, and then use this information to cluster individuals together in social categories. Adults are known to be more accurate at recognizing a face from their own racial group than from an unfamiliar racial group. That this type of face processing is not present in infants at 3 months of age suggests that it is not innate. In fact, it emerges by 6 months in infants living in an environment with little racial diversity (i.e., a racially homogeneous environment). This indicates that facial input from the infant's visual environment is a key contributing factor. Therefore, at an early age children show categorization ability based on race.

Evidence suggests that such social categorization can result in preference for one's own group. Psychologists have investigated this in studies using a visual preference task. In this task, infants are presented with examples from two racial categories simultaneously, and how long they look at each example is used to indicate preference. Studies using this task show that by the time they are 3 months old, infants prefer to look at faces of their own racial group rather than those of other racial groups. This preference is not typically shown by newborns and is only present in 3-month-old infants living in a predominantly racially homogeneous environment. These findings suggest that the early development of own-race preference in infancy is linked to living in an environment that exposes the children only to own-race individuals.

Developmentally, infants have social categorization ability and, depending on their environment, this may result in certain group preferences. However, at this stage they do not have the ability to express prejudice or stereotypes due to their limited cognitive and linguistic abilities. As infants become young children, they often express biases directly or explicitly in the words they use to describe different social groups, or more indirectly or implicitly by forming mental associations linking their own group (rather than other groups) with positive experiences, emotions, or attributes (i.e., showing implicit biases).

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