Seminar 7

Most 3- and 4-year-olds have formed basic concepts of race and ethnicity.

Indicators of social class are not accessible to young children, but they can distinguish rich from poor on the basis of physical characteristics, such as clothing, residence, and possessions.

By the early school years, children absorb prevailing societal attitudes.

Children do not necessarily acquire these views directly.

They may fill in gaps in their information with information they encounter in the media and elsewhere, inferring others’ attitudes on the basis of their own.

Children pick up much information about group status from implicit messages in their

surroundings and are especially likely to form biased attitudes when an authority figure validates a status hierarchy.

In-group favoritism emerges first and strengthens until age 7 to 8.

Out-group prejudice requires a social comparison between in-group and out-group but forms quickly in children who are in the ethnic majority, especially when they have little direct experience with ethnic minority out-groups.

Many ethnic minority children, absorbing their culture’s ethnic stereotypes, show a reverse

pattern, out-group favoritism, in which they assign positive characteristics to the privileged

ethnic majority and negative characteristics to their own group.

School-age children, who can classify the social world in multiple ways, understand that

people who look different need not think, feel, or act differently; as a result, their voicing of

negative attitudes toward minorities declines.

After age 7 to 8, both majority and minority children express in-group favoritism, and the ,majority children’s prejudice against out-group members often weakens.

The extent to which children hold ethnic and social-class biases depends on personal and situational factors.

Children who believe that personality traits are fixed rather than changeable are more likely to form extreme impressions of individuals or groups on the basis of limited information.

Children (and adults) with very high self-esteem are more likely to hold unfair ethnic biases.

Children for whom adults tend to highlight group distinctions are more likely to display in-group favoritism and out-group prejudice.

An effective way to reduce prejudice in both children and adults is through intergroup contact, in which ethnically different individuals have equal status, work toward common goals, and become personally acquainted, while authority figures expect them to engage in such interaction.

Schoolchildren assigned to cooperative learning groups, in which they work toward joint goals with peers of diverse backgrounds and characteristics and show low levels of prejudice, forming more cross-race friendships than children in typical classrooms.

Long-term contact and collaboration among neighborhood, school, and community groups

may be the best ways to reduce ethnic prejudices.

Classrooms that expose children to broad ethnic diversity, teach them to understand and value differences, directly address the damage caused by prejudice, and encourage

perspective taking and empathy prevent children from forming negative biases and reduce already acquired biases.

A promising approach to reducing prejudice is by inducing children to view others’ traits as

malleable rather than fixed.

Attending integrated classrooms leads to higher achievement, educational attainment, and occupational aspirations among ethnic minority students and greatly increases the likelihood that young people will lead integrated lives as adults.

Perspective taking—the capacity to imagine what other people may be thinking and feeling—is

important for a wide variety of social–cognitive achievements: understanding others’ emotions;

appreciating false belief; developing referential communication skills, self-concept, self-esteem, and person perception; and reducing prejudice.

Piaget regarded egocentrism—inability to take the viewpoint of another—as the major feature responsible for the immaturity of preschoolers’ thought; yet even toddlers show some capacity for perspective taking in the second year of life, as soon as they become consciously self-aware.

At first, children have only a limited idea of what other people might be thinking and feeling;

over time, they become aware that people can interpret the same event differently.

Older children and adolescents can evaluate two people’s perspectives simultaneously, at first from the vantage point of a disinterested spectator and later by making reference to societal values.