Racial Essentialism is Associated with Prejudice Towards Blacks in 5- and 6-Year-Old White Children

Tara Mandalaywala, Marjorie Rhodes

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Psychological essentialism is a cognitive bias that leads people to view members of a category as sharing a deep, underlying, inherent nature that causes them to be fundamentally similar to one another in non-obvious ways. Although essentialist beliefs can be beneficial, allowing people to view the social world as stable and predictable, essentialist beliefs about social categories such as race or ethnicity are also thought to underlie the development of stereotyping and prejudice. Whereas recent studies in adults have found that racial essentialism is associated with increased prejudice, the development of this relationship has rarely been examined. The present research examined the implications of essentialism for prejudice in a population of white five- and six-year old children in the United States, and revealed that essentialist beliefs about race are associated with increased implicit and explicit prejudice towards members of a minority racial group.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2016
EditorsAnna Papafragou, Daniel Grodner, Daniel Mirman, John C. Trueswell
PublisherThe Cognitive Science Society
Pages1319-1324
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9780991196739
StatePublished - 2016
Event38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Recognizing and Representing Events, CogSci 2016 - Philadelphia, United States
Duration: Aug 10 2016Aug 13 2016

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2016

Conference

Conference38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Recognizing and Representing Events, CogSci 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPhiladelphia
Period8/10/168/13/16

Keywords

  • cognitive development
  • essentialism
  • prejudice
  • race
  • social

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

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