Interventions against racial stereotype acquisition should directly manipulate children's essentialist thinking about racial groups¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 5 claims (4 for, 1 mixed) · 1 study (1 associational), q3 · 1 of 1 report an effect size · 5 claims rest on one study

Description¶

Because stereotypes, once formed, are highly resistant to change and can affect children's academic performance, the authors recommend intervening before stereotypes consolidate. They argue that "interventions aimed altering racial stereotypes may best be accomplished by directly manipulating children's pattern of thinking about racial groups," teaching children that race is not necessarily an immutable category and that skin color does not convey stable information about psychological attributes. This targets the essentialist thinking the study identified as a unique predictor of out-group stereotyping.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Interventions must occur before stereotypes are consolidated, ideally around the age when out-group stereotyping emerges (around 6 years)

Constraints¶

• The authors note that interventions aiming to reduce race salience may be difficult to implement without making large-scale changes in a child's environment

Target Learners¶

• children ages 3–10, especially those around 6 years of age

Target Learning Goals¶

• reducing the acquisition of racial stereotypes and susceptibility to stereotyping

Affordances¶

• Developmental Intergroup Theory Salience Categorization Essentialism

Claims¶

• Children's essentialist reasoning about racial change increased with age, and essentialist reasoning about others (but not the self) predicted out-group stereotyping [+W]
• Children in the two oldest age groups used out-group stereotypes above chance (50%), with the largest effect among 7–10-year-olds (r = .80) [+W]
• Children begin applying racial stereotypes to out-groups around age 6, with out-group stereotyping increasing across age groups while in-group stereotyping shows no reliable age differences [+W]
• Sorting by race, racial constancy for self, and racial constancy for others uniquely predicted out-group stereotyping in a hierarchical regression controlling for age, sex, ethnicity, and classification skill [+W]
• Racial justification (merely noticing and describing racial differences) did not uniquely predict out-group stereotyping, unlike functional sorting by race [~W]

Related Strategies¶

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Pauker, K., Ambady, N., & Apfelbaum, E. P. (2010). Race Salience and Essentialist Thinking in Racial Stereotype Development. Child Development, 81(6), 1799–1813. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01511.x