Essentialism promotes children's inter-ethnic bias

Frontiers in Psychology

Gil Diesendruck¹ 

关键词: essentialism;    attitudes;    social categories;    children;    ethnicity;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01180

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY