acquisition and reduction of prejudice, but stable social influences rather than temporary environmental cues have greater explanatory value. To understand why certain social influences are greater than others, developmentalists consider children’s motivation to make sense of their social world and their place in it – a cognitively driven motivation – in addition to their desire for approval and other short-term goals. Consequently, the two explanatory frameworks currently used in developmental research, namely social influ- ences in the environment and cognitive/emotional developments in the child, take a longer term perspective but are not incompatible with the prevailing social psychology view.
Our chapter focuses on ethnic/racial intergroup bias. Although biases based on gender, disability, and other criteria also exist in children, their development does not always follow the same trajectory (Fishbein, 1996; Powlishta, Serbin, Doyle, & White, 1994).
Ethnic bias has been particularly harmful in imposing constraints on the social and aca- demic opportunities afforded minority children, and on the social relationships of major- ity children. Gender stereotypes impose the same harmful constraints on development;
however, we know that boys and girls will eventually be dating and mating. The ethnic divide only becomes larger with age, not necessarily because of personal bias, but because of societal structures such as marriage and religion that keep us apart.
We review several aspects of the development of intergroup bias: attitudes, categorical perceptions and cognitions about ethnicity, and cross-ethnic peer relations. These differ- ent ways of understanding ethnicity and relating to members of ethnic groups may not show consistent levels of bias. Moreover, they may not necessarily reflect bias. For example, awareness of different ethnic groups and the formation of social categories are not in themselves harmful. However, the over-use of categories when making judgments about individuals often leads to inaccuracy because of an exaggeration of between-group differences and within-group homogeneity. This can interfere with recognition and respect for an individual’s qualities. Although schema-driven judgments are arguably more normative (i.e., prevalent) than data-driven judgments, they are not necessarily inevitable or normal. Our theories of development will eventually have to explain not only the uni- versal tendency to categorize (the focus of social cognitive and evolutionary frameworks) but also the age, individual and cultural differences that are so apparent in heterogeneous societies.
To organize the recent developmental research on intergroup bias, we will discuss measurement issues and then review findings with respect to age and majority-minority status of children. The final section will deal with explanatory frameworks, such as the influence of significant others, cultural-historical variables, and cognitive development.
such attitudes, beliefs, affect, or behavior in an individual demonstrates intergroup bias to the extent that they are based on only one item of information about a person, namely his or her group membership. What they hold in common is a predisposed negativity toward a group of people.
A discussion of measurement techniques leads to the question of how children’s prejudice differs from adults’ prejudice. This question often arises because teachers and parents express disbelief at the early high levels of prejudice reported by researchers. They claim to be unaware of prejudice in all but a few young children. Most people identify spontaneous slurs and stereotypic remarks as indications of prejudice. Children, however, differ from adults in verbal and emotional sophistication. Consequently, they do not fre- quently express their prejudice in racial slurs. Furthermore, the emotional underpinnings of children’s prejudice is less likely to be anger and hostility and more likely to be suspi- cion, fear, sadness, and expectations or projections of rejection, harm, and avoidance.
Early childhood prejudice may reflect a developmental phenomenon more than a stable personality characteristic in some children whose levels change dramatically between 6 and 9 years (Doyle & Aboud, 1995).
In addition, prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination do not develop simultaneously in children, so there is little consistency among the different components of bias. At 4 and 5 years, they often express prejudice without any accurate recognition of the groups they dislike (Bar-Tal, 1996). Similarly, youngsters hold prejudiced attitudes without knowing any of the attributes included in adults’ stereotypes. They may not use their atti- tudes or beliefs to guide their behavior or choice of playmates (Hirschfeld, 1996). One behavior often considered as an index of discrimination is ethnic conflict, accompanied by name-calling, hassling, fighting, and intimidation; however, higher levels of conflict are directed to ingroup than outgroup peers and seem to be associated with certain aggres- sive individuals (Aboud, 1992; Patchen, 1982; Schofield, 1982). More closely associated with prejudice are avoidance and exclusion in peer relations, yet even the possession of outgroup friends does not strongly correlate with attitudes. The components of inter- group bias may converge, if at all, only in middle childhood when the child has some control over these mental and behavioral processes and can bring them to bear on each other. This understanding has guided our selection of age-appropriate constructs measured in the pre-adolescent years.
Measurement of prejudiced attitudes in children focuses on negative evaluation of group members. The Doll Test, developed by Clark (1955) was most commonly used before 1975. Children were asked to point to one doll in response to questions such as:
Which is the nice color? Typically the sample’s responses to each separate item were ana- lyzed by comparing the frequencies with chance (usually 50%). This meant that the degree of consensus in the sample was addressed, rather than the prevalence of prejudice or the identification of prejudiced children. Despite the limitations of this methodology, the findings fairly accurately reflected the common tendency of White children to show negative attitudes toward brown-skinned figures.
Since the development of the Preschool Racial Attitude Measure (PRAM) by Williams, Best, and Boswell (1975), it has become possible to measure the level of prejudice in indi- vidual children. By including multiple items, researchers can derive a more reliable prejudice score by aggregating many responses, assessing convergent or predictive
validity, and correlating scores with age, parental attitudes, and other potentially causal variables. More recent measures of this variety include Katz’ (Katz & Zalk, 1978) Pro- jective Prejudice Test, Davey’s (1983) post box technique, and Doyle and Aboud’s Multi- response Racial Attitude (MRA) measure (1995). A distinct advantage is obtained with measures such as the MRA, where the respondent is allowed to assign the same positive and negative evaluations (e.g., plays fair, bossy) to more than one group. They allow for the assessment of attitudes that run counter to ingroup bias, namely positive evaluations of outgroups and negative evaluations of the ingroup. These counter-bias attitudes may be more or less accessible than biased attitudes, depending on the age, individual, situa- tion, and training. The rise of counter-bias attitudes, rather than the decline of bias, appears to change most during middle childhood.
One common criticism of conventional measures is that children may mask their true attitudes in order to appear socially desirable. This criticism is based on the notion that older children in particular know that prejudice is undesirable and so make unprejudiced evaluations to obtain approval from the experimenter. Several studies have attempted to rule out this explanation (Aboud & Doyle, 1996a; Aboud & Fenwick, 1999). The studies have found that responses to the Children’s Social Desirability Scale do not correlate with prejudice. They have also found that while social desirability concerns should minimize negative evaluations of minorities, it is not these evaluations that change with age; rather negative evaluations of Whites and positive evaluations of minorities increase. In addi- tion, children verbalize evaluations in line with their prejudice test scores when talking with peers. Finally, when children are asked to report on their friends’ prejudice, a method that should reduce social desirability concerns, low-prejudice children do not demonstrate a self–friend discrepancy. High-prejudice children do show a slight discrepancy, report- ing higher prejudice for their friend than for themselves, though they report high preju- dice for both.
Another criticism is that children are forced to evaluate categories of stimulus persons (Carrington & Short, 1993), in that they are given the evaluative descriptors and only one “representative” of the category. In answer to this criticism, researchers have used spontaneous open-ended formats, with unresolved problems. One is to simply ask chil- dren how they feel about familiar or unfamiliar pictured children from different groups (Holmes, 1995; Lerner & Schroeder, 1975; Ramsey, 1991). Questions include: What do you think this person is like? Is it good or bad to be a person like this? Why? Who would you like/not like to have as a friend (and why)? Would you like to be this person (and why)? The more unstructured questions fail to elicit many comments from young chil- dren, those elicited are generally neutral in tone, and reasons are not explicitly racial. The same children who spontaneously described mostly neutral descriptors also assigned over 70% of positive attributes to Whites and negative attributes to Blacks (Lerner &
Schroeder, 1975). Does this imply that structured evaluative questions make children appear prejudiced when in fact they are not? A more likely explanation is that sponta- neous descriptions reflect a lack of verbal sophistication and cognitive access to the racial basis of judgments.
In summary, this outline of the measures points to their various strengths and limita- tions in the hope that researchers will converge on a common set of measures for the con- struct of prejudice. Consensus on measures has the advantage of producing data that can
be compared directly – data that are valid in addressing the theoretical questions of how and why children develop intergroup bias.