Effect of neutral conditioning on racial attitudes of children.
The purpose of this experiment was to test the effectiveness of classical conditioning procedures in reducing negative evaluative responses, i.e., attitudes, toward pictures of Afro-American people. Ss were 73 Euro-American kindergarten children who received either 0, 1, 4, or 8 conditioning sessions of 36 pairings of the color black with neutral words. Two racial attitude scales were employed to measure amount of change in Ss' racial attitudes after exposure to the conditiong procedures. Parish's (1972) Revised PRAM II did not detect any change, but Williams' (1971) PRAM II demonstrated a significant reduction in anti-Afro-American attitudes for those Ss who received 8 conditioning sessions.
D001741:Black or African American; D001290:Attitude; D001364:Awareness; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005120:Extraversion, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011287:Prejudice