The author discusses how negative racial attitudes originate. First, she looks globally at how various theories have attempted to explain the origins of racism. Second, she reviews some research on this topic that she and her colleagues have completed with very young children. Both the theories and the studies have ramifications for how…

The prediction was confirmed that young children would experience more difficulty in learning to discriminate faces of another race than those of their own. Additional findings revealed that discrimination-learning performance with racial stimuli is related to a number of factors including developmental level, race of the subject, and race of the…

The purposes of this study were (1) to investigate the possibility that children's racial attitudes could be modified by means of stimulus predifferentiation training, (2) to assess the developmental implications of such training, and (3) to assess the relative sensitivity of two different attitude measures to such manipulation. Subjects were 96…

Investigated the effects of perceptual differentiation in groups and assessed its relation to intergroup attitudes in children Subjects were black children and white children from the second, fourth and sixth grades. (SDH)

A doll choice task was administered to white and black nursery and kindergarten children by same and other race examiners. Male and female dolls were presented which differed only in skin color. Strong preference for white dolls found by previous studies was not obtained. (Author/BJG)

A test consisting of slides of ambiguous school situations was designed for measuring racial attitudes in children. For each slide, the subject is asked to choose which child initiated or is the recipient of a positive or negative event. The instrument was standardized on 547 black and white urban, public school children at the first, second,…

This study compared the relative efficacy of four short-term intervention techniques for modifying negative racial attitudes in White second- and fifth-grade school children. (CM)

The most significant finding is that stimulus-predifferentiation training elicited lower prejudice scores for children on two indices of ethnic attitudes than did a no-label control condition. (Author)

Why some children become biased and the conditions behind such biases are explored in this paper. The focus is on developmental patterns associated with race and gender attitudes during the preschool period and the factors that predict bias. The study examined children who were six months old and followed them and their families (N=210) until the…

This study applied a schema-based, social information processing model to examine the development of social cognitive aspects of preschoolers' racial stereotyping and stereotype beliefs (i.e., preschoolers' race schemas). The study examined developmental and individual differences in preschoolers' race schematization (salience of the race…

The research reported in this paper has three major purposes: to assess the development of racial attitudes in urban children, to evaluate the effects of race of examiner on children's expressed attitudes, and to examine some of the perceptual correlates of racial attitudes. It was predicted that older children would perceive faces of another race…

The theoretical rationale underlying the present investigations begins with the assumption that perceptual categorization of racial groups is a prerequisite for subsequent attitude development. It is predicted that if increased perceptual similarity of other groups does indeed initiate attitude acquisition, then it follows that a decrease in…

Ways in which children learn about race and form attitudes towards groups other than their own are described and the processes underlying the development of racial awareness and racial attitudes are delineated. The first three sections of the paper discuss the age at which racial attitudes begin to form, the developmental antecedents of racial…