title: Essentialism promotes children's inter-ethnic bias.
abstract: The present study investigated the developmental foundation of the relation between social essentialism and attitudes. Forty-eight Jewish Israeli secular 6-year-olds were exposed to either a story emphasizing essentialism about ethnicity, or stories controlling for the salience of ethnicity or essentialism per se. After listening to a story, children's attitudes were assessed in a drawing and in an IAT task. Compared to the control conditions, children in the ethnic essentialism condition drew a Jewish and an Arab character as farther apart from each other, and the Jewish character with a more positive affect than the Arab character. Moreover, boys in the ethnic essentialism condition manifested a stronger bias in the IAT. These findings reveal an early link between essentialism and inter-group attitudes.
authors: Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University Ramat-Gan, Israel.
authors: Gil
authors: G
authors: Diesendruck
authors: Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University Ramat-Gan, Israel.
authors: Roni
authors: R
authors: Menahem
keywords: attitudes; children; essentialism; ethnicity; social categories