title: Race salience and essentialist thinking in racial stereotype development.
abstract: The authors explored the emergence and antecedents of racial stereotyping in 89 children ages 3-10 years. Children completed a number of matching and sorting tasks, including a measure designed to assess their knowledge and application of both positive and negative in-group and out-group stereotypes. Results indicate that children start to apply stereotypes to the out-group starting around 6 years of age. Controlling for a number of factors, 2 predictors contributed significantly toward uniquely explaining the use of these stereotypes: race salience (i.e., seeing and organizing by race) and essentialist thinking (i.e., believing that race cannot change). These results provide insight into how and when real-world interventions aimed at altering the acquisition of racial stereotypes may be implemented.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. kpauker@stanford.edu
authors.forename: Kristin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Pauker
authors.forename: Nalini
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Ambady
authors.forename: Evan P
authors.initials: EP
authors.lastname: Apfelbaum
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D044469:Racial Groups / Q000523:psychology*; D012931:Social Environment; D012933:Social Identification; D012938:Social Perception; D013240:Stereotyping; D013850:Thinking