Racial Stereotype Application in 4-to-8-Year Old White American Children: Emergence and Specificity

• In Event: Who belongs here? Children's attitudes about immigration and nationality

Abstract

Understanding how and when cultural stereotypes (i.e., attributes or traits associated with a group) and racial attitudes (i.e., general feeling toward members of racial groups) emerge is paramount to addressing social group biases from an early age onward. The few studies that have examined stereotype application in young children (i.e., up to 8 years) typically do not clearly delineate whether children’s responses are guided by specific cultural stereotypes or by their general positive and negative attitudes about racial groups (e.g., Augoustinos & Rosewarne, 2001; Bigler & Liben, 1993). The current preregistered research therefore aims to delve deeper into the question of when the application of cultural stereotypes about racial groups emerges in childhood (distinct from racial attitudes) and which stereotypes young children apply to various racial groups.

We examined White American children’s application of positive and negative stereotypes to three racial groups: Asian, Black, and White. We focused on six traits that typically lead to race-based stereotypic inferences in adults (e.g., Zou & Cheryan, 2017): intelligence, athleticism, being American, niceness, wealth, and honesty. Because White children start to express in-group favoritism at age 4 (Raabe & Beelmann, 2011) and previous research suggests that children show consistent application of cultural racial stereotypes by 8-9 years (e.g., Brown et al, 2017; Rowley et al., 2007), we focused on 4-to-8-year-old children to study the emergence and development of racial stereotyping.

We preregistered two contrasting hypotheses. One hypothesis (1a) was that White children would apply traits based simply on valence, in alignment with their racial attitudes. The alternative hypothesis (1b) was that White children would apply traits in line with prevailing cultural stereotypes applied by adults (e.g., they would indicate that Black children are more athletic but not more honest than White children). We explored whether the basis for children’s responses might change over development.

In Study 1 (N = 128) participants indicated their stereotype application for children from different racial groups using a 6-point-‘ladder’-scale. In Study 2 (N = 128) a more sensitive forced choice measure was used. Across two studies, we observed clear and consistent evidence for only one cultural stereotype: participants of all ages indicated that Black targets were less American than White children and, with age, participants also reported that Asian targets were less American than White targets. However, for athleticism, niceness, wealth, and honesty, participants’ application of cultural stereotypes did not reveal an adult-like pattern. Rather participants indicated that Black targets were just as athletic, nice, wealthy, and honest as White targets, whereas participants rated Asian targets less favorably on these four traits compared to White targets. In a measure of racial attitudes in Study 2, participants did prefer White children over Black and Asian children – similar to previous research (Dunham et al., 2011; Raabe & Beelmann, 2011)

Taken together, this research suggests that, in contrast to previous work (i.e., Pauker et al., 2010), only stereotypes about being American emerge in early childhood. Moreover, this research indicates that children’s cultural stereotypes are separate from children’s attitudes early in development.

Authors

• Jellie Sierksma, Utrecht University
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth L Brey, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kristin Shutts, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Non-Presenting Author