ch.8 Flashcards
awareness of social categories
Children form categories to simplify the world and free up mental resources.
Categorization helps children develop an accurate picture of their social world.
Two types:
Implicit awareness – conscious
Explicit awareness – unconscious or preverbal
implicit awareness of social categories
Children implicitly recognize differences between basic social categories without being able to verbalize those differences.
Infants can detect differences.
Fagan and Singer’s (1979) research using the habituation paradigm suggest that gender and age, but not race, are meaningful categories for infants.
Infants are implicitly aware of some social categories by 6 months of age.
This suggests that the ability to form social categories is an innate process.
explicit awareness of social categories
Gender category awareness
Researchers asked young children to classify photos of people based on gender.
Results showed that children use gender labels appropriately by 2.5 or 3 years of age.
racial category awareness
Doll technique– children are presented with two (or more) dolls and asked to identify which one looks like a White child.
Regardless of their own ethnicity, by age 4 or 5, children can use the racial categories Back and White correctly, and between 5 and 9 for other racial groups.
Research suggests that children become aware of racial categories because they see adults responding differently to people of different races.
development of prejudice
The basis of children’s preferences are not always clear.
May be due to attitudes or based on some other social, emotional, or cognitive process.
Children categorized other children differently depending on the reason for the category formation.
Ex. Categories in general or categories of playmates.
development of racial prejudice
Methodological issues
forced choice method – the participant must choose one of two options presented.
Ex. Color Meaning Test (CMT) and Preschool Racial Attitude Measure (PRAM II)
Preference of one choice does not necessarily mean rejection of the other choice.
Continuous measure measure – the participant has a range of options to make finer-grained distinctions and assess complex judgments.
Ex. Social Distance Scale
development of racial prejudice
Methodological issues
_________________________________ ratings – research procedure that measures peer status.
Ex. Best friend procedure
Problem in that not being named as a “best friend” is not the same as being disliked.
Results tend to be similar, but different from self-report research.
white children’s attitudes
White children develop racial attitudes, both positive and negative ones, between ages 3 and 4.
Ingroup and outgroup attitudes seem to be distinct sets of attitudes.
Racial prejudice reaches its highest level around 4 or 5years of age, and then declines sometime between age 6 and 9.
black children’s attitudes
Also develops racial attitudes at 3 or 4 years of age.
Black children show less stability than White children in their racial preference patterns.
No typical ethnic attitudinal pattern has been found for 5- to 7-year-old Black children.
Pro-Black attitudes, pro-White attitudes, and unbiased attitudes can occur.
Between ages 7 and 10, Black children typically show more pro-Black or unbiased attitudes.
attitudes of children from other groups
Preference patterns for children of other races are less consistent than they are for White children.
Mexican American and Asian children show attitudinal patterns similar to those of Black children.
Biracial children did not significantly differ from Black children or White children in racial attitudes, although Black and White children differed significantly from one another.Regardless of race, all children acquire racial preferences and attitudes between 3 and 5 years of age.
intergroup behavior
Both Black and White children designate best friends on the basis of race starting in ____ grade.
Racial segregations increases between age ___ and ___, and is at a peak in ____ to ____ grades.
The majority of high school students report having positive cross-race interactions at school, but less than half report having them outside of school.
development of gender bases prejudice
Gender-based prejudice emerges by age 3 and is quite strong by age 4.
Prejudice is initially symmetrical and bidirectional.
Boys hold negative attitudes about girls.
Girls hold equally negative attitudes about boys.
Between age 4 and 8, both boys and girls reject feminine characteristics and value masculine characteristics.
After age 8, other-sex prejudice declines.
theories of prejudice discrimination
Three theories of how prejudice develops in children:
Social Learning Theory
Inner State Theories
Cognitive Developmental Theories
social learning theory
Explains prejudice in terms of direct reinforcement, modeling and imitation, and vicarious learning.
Direct teaching of prejudice is not very common.
Prejudiced attitudes more often come from indirect teaching of prejudice from family and peers, and symbolic models in the media.
inner state theories
Focus on the development of prejudice in terms of age-related changes in personality and other individual-difference variables.
Proposes that prejudice is caused by something inside the person, such as personality.
Psychoanalytic theorists propose that child-rearing practices lead to authoritarianism and social dominance orientation.
Genetics also influence personality.
Inherited predispositions and childhood experiences may play a role in the development of authoritarianism, SDO, and prejudice.
Authoritarian beliefs may also be acquired through socialization.
Two main sources of social learning are parents and personal experience.
