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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 outgroup 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 selfesteem 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, selfconcept, 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.