Is Prejudice Developmentally Inevitable?

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Running Head: PREJUDICE DEVELOPMENTALLY INEVITABLE

Discuss the view that Prejudice is Developmentally Inevitable Despoina Limniotaki University of Kent

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The question of whether prejudice is inevitable, would not bear just a synopsis of the times when adults were recorded to respond in a particular manner towards a stimulus category. Inevitability entails a deeper dive into the mechanisms of prejudice, in an attempt to track down the onset of its activation. Although the word “predisposition” is a prerequisite for many formal definitions of prejudice, nothing may be considered final unless a closer look is taken at its developmental aspects. An individual, is true, never ceases to develop both biologically and intellectually. However, it is in the tendencies and practices that precede adulthood that inevitability flows. Studying children’s biases should not lead one to assume that there are two kinds of prejudice: a children and an adult kind. There must be qualitative differences between the two, in the way that adult prejudice is really children prejudice on the loose. But the processes underlying them are similar and so prejudice can be studied in children effortlessly. This will not come to pass without practical implications, though. If, indeed, children are biased, parents and educators will be called on its defence. The first task still is to try and identify prejudice in the most inclusive way possible. What is prejudice? Aboud (1988) speaks of an attitude that incorporates three main features. First of all, this attitude has to be of a negative, hateful quality. Positive prejudices, if any, do not mess up with our everyday chores. Second, prejudice is organized. Organised inside the individual, that is, coming from within, well established but subjective, and, so, unjustified. Third, it is mostly directed towards groups, instead of individual attributes. In other words, evaluations elicited by ethnicity rather than personal qualities of an individual, indicate prejudice. And it is that evaluative

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component that distinguishes it from stereotypes, since the latter are just beliefs, however generalized, about ethnic group members. Accordingly, Aboud says that two people may hold the same stereotype but only one of them be prejudiced. Furthermore, that emotionally mediated component builds up a tendency to react in a disapproving way. Why should this tendency arise, is a question for which explanations vary as a function of theoretical background and concentrated experimentation. The psychodynamic perspective speaks about internal conflicts stemming from child-rearing practices that induce hostility and anger. Specifically, authoritarian parents treat their children with frustration and oppose to their attempts to independency, bringing about a lot of aggression to them. Children, in return, overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety and guilt, due to the fact that aggression is “inappropriate”, suffer hostility towards their parents. Because they can not display this hostility against their own parents, or against any comparable authority figure for that matter and, also, because they have in the mean time identified with the parent and introjected some characteristic of the anxiety object, they direct their hostility to minority groups, to the “weak”. From being the threatened ones, they change into the aggressors, a process that helps them overcome the fear of punishment they had undergone. A repetitive practice like that, provides them with the material of which the superego may crystallize: opinions and qualities of their authoritarian parents that children have now made their own. This new defensive means, which Freud (1972) called identification with the aggressor is the answer to a systematic harassment on the outside world. Prejudice, then, reflects an internal state. However, this view has not been left without a

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shred of doubt especially because of its disproportionate concern with the deviant. Yet, other researchers, influenced by it, have formulated the grounds for the Inner State Theory in the explanation of prejudice, for example Adorno et al. (as cited in Aboud, 1988). On the other hand, an explanation for prejudice comes from the socio-cognitive domain, following Piaget’s suggestions on preferences following cognitive stages (see for example, Piaget and Weil, 1951, as cited in Brown, 1995). On the genesis of nationalism, Piaget believed that, at least in the beginning of a child’s social life, prejudice is inevitable due to cognitive limitations that, afterwards, follow a specific developmental pattern. That is, at the age of four, a child’s grasp of the world is somehow egocentric, characterized by a fuzzy distinction between the part and the whole that makes it difficult for him or her to elaborate on the concept of country, too. Later, at about eight years old, the child begins to understand that members of different countries may not share the same views and, thus, be dissimilar in that measure. When decentration and integration takes place, at the age of about ten years old, the child may then understand the nature of a country. In other words, understanding parallels cognitive abilities. Aboud (1988), herself, suggests a similar three-stage model. In the first stage, understanding follows perceptual cues, whereas classification covers only very broad categories. Stage two, is characterized by conservation of concepts and in the third stage, variation among groups becomes renowned. However, her proposed model does not account for gender attitudes, nor does it provide application hints to majority vs. minority group experimentation (Brown, 1995).

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Can prejudice occur in children through basic observation and imitation? This is the impression of the Social Reflection Theory. Parental verbal and nonverbal behaviour provides cues for biased training and identification (Aboud, 1988). In fact, the simplest explanation for the inception of prejudice is children’s innocent imitation of their parents. It may be then, that children begin life without prejudice but they acquire it gradually over time through learning (Allport, 1954, as cited in Powlishta, Serbin, Doyle, & White, 1994). Alternatively, prejudice may even be the product of unsuccessful imprinting, as in the case of behaviours manifested by some orphanage children, who, in the absence of early learning and deprived of environmental examples that would discourage the development of prejudice, illustrate a hostile face to the society that “isolated them” (see for example, Hess, 1962, as cited in Sluckin, 1972). Therefore, Aboud says, and following from the theories mentioned above, prejudiced individuals can be brought up to fill in three categories: the conventional type category, in which one is content with one’s social life and society and, in which, one owns an external set of values borrowed from other people. The authoritarian type category, in which one exhibits anger and aggression, feels revenge and, in which, prejudice stems from internal needs, rather than social pressures. And a third category, of which members display difficulty in coping with life’s struggles. All types, Aboud concludes, are equally prejudiced but the manifestations of their prejudice diverge. Still, one cannot easily apply labels to children in an effort to locate prejudice in attitudes of everyday use. Do gender preferences in the

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playground show partiality, for instance, or is it happenstance? The problem lies in the term itself: prejudice, sounds too sophisticated to be used with respect to children. It is better to think in terms of outlines of prejudiced attitude and hope for the best (Aboud, 1988). Many contemporary theoreticians believe that prejudice is a normal phenomenon rooted in categorization. Categorization occurs universally and it is indispensable to our social lives because it provides us with schemata that aid survival. Since our cognitive systems have limited capacity, efficient functioning is achieved through short cuts that differentiate and assimilate incoming information into clusters. Categorization reduces uncertainty but can often be biased (Brown, 1995). Thus, prejudice is built to our cognitive processes and, at least at an unconscious, automatic level, it is inevitable, states the inevitability of prejudice argument (Devine, 1989). The fundamentals of category awareness has been a subject matter under investigation for years. When and how do children come to think in terms of categories? Aboud (1988) says that the problem with identifying prejudice in children lies in the fact that they develop an understanding of labels and categories later in life and, consequently, they classify people less than we would have “preferred” them to. Children’s negative evaluations do not necessarily denote prejudice, nor are these evaluations of hateful quality, which is a prerequisite for prejudice to formulate. Last but not least, identification of individual attributes may also be unclear to them and, in any case, it is not a precondition for favouritism. However, literature on categorization does present three categories to emerge early in a person’s life

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and to be the default form that generates automatic responses, namely race (ethnicity), gender, and age. Indeed, attentiveness to various social categories is met in very young children. One of the earliest attempts to spot attentiveness to ethnicity was made by Clark and Clark, who, using white and brown dolls asked children to give the researchers the doll that bears a resemblance to a white (or coloured) child. They found that five-year-old children could, in their majority, identify the ethnicity of the doll correctly (Clark and Clark, 1947, as cited in Brown, 1995). In 1979 Fagan and Singer used the habituation paradigm with babies that were only five or six months old. They discovered that babies could discriminate between two stimuli when those were presented together. The time the babies would stare at each stimulus was used as a measure of discrimination. Even when Fagan and Singer used similar sex or age photographs, the results would be in favour of their hypothesis. They found gender and age differentiation. Ethnic differentiation was not found. Similar were the results of a study by Langlois in 1987, who used two to eight monthold infants as subjects. With the presentation of attractive vs. unattractive photographs, infants were found to fixate the attractive photographs, thus exhibiting discrimination (as cited in Brown, 1995). What is more, male infants were found to spend more time fixating male faces as opposed to female ones. This finding suggests that infants can at least detect and act on their own gender. Other research has found that, by the fourth year of age, children can have favourable attitudes towards their own ethnic group, whereas by the age of five, they show gender preferences. Then, favouritism

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and the knowledge of nationality, as Piaget suggested, come about from the age of seven onwards (as cited in Bennett, Sani, Lyons, & Barrett, 1998). Bennett, Sani, Lyons, and Barrett (1998), though, in an experiment on nationality awareness and self-conceptions, challenged the idea adopted by many social psychologists that preference for one’s group occurs due to mere self-categorization and identification. They, rather, suggested that, although positive information about one’s own national group precedes identification, by means of socially shared knowledge, that identification will not, in succession and unavoidably, lead to favouritism. In their study, Bennett et al. were mostly interested in children that did not identify with their national group. They found that failure to identify with one’s national group could still evoke preference of it. Aboud (1988) believed that much of the experimental literature on the development of the nationalistic self engages in the “correct” assigning of labels to various faces or pictures of people by children, as the independent variable. Indeed, the most ordinary studies on preferences in general, involve the question of sorting photographs into groups according to how much they double. Tajfel, for example, in an experiment on pro-own nationality preferences, asked children to allocate a set of photographs into two categories according to nationality and, later, place the same photos into four boxes according to how much the children liked them. Interestingly, he found evidence for preference in very young children of six to eleven years of age (Tajfel, 1972, as cited in Brown, 1995). Contemporary studies have tested sex-typed behaviours and their first appearance in a child’s life. For example, Verkuyten, Masson, and Elfers

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(1995) detected gender preferences in explaining undesirable behaviour. As part of a more elaborate experiment among children from ten to twelve years old in the Netherlands, they introduced a story about the stealing of a marble. The scenario was as follows: they asked a child each time to imagine that he/she possessed a beautiful marble. During class he/she had to put this marble in his/her jacket, which hung in the hall. When the bell rang for the break, the child found that the marble was gone from inside the jacket. The child had to choose from a previously sorted group of eight photographs of children, which child they thought would never steal the marble. The photographs would then have to be rank-ordered. That is, each child had to put in a line the photographs of children they thought would never still the marble to the photographs of those children who might do so and indicate where they would draw a line between the two (p. 644). Verkuyten et al. found that gender was a strong dimension for the decision about the stealing. Although he also varied skin colour and facial expression in his overall experiment, in this particular task, boys were just expected to steal the marble more than girls were. Neutral-looking male targets, compared to smiling ones, were also judged as likely to steal, among the boys. What is fascinating is the fact that previous tasks of the same experiment showed facial expression and skin colour to be determinants of prejudiced decisions. So, one may say, different categories fit different tasks. Yee and Brown (1994) asked children, from three to nine years of age, to sort pictures of fellow students into two piles as a first task. The sorting criterion employed by the children was the important thing in this study. As a next step, Yee and Brown asked children for “nice” and “not nice” thoughts

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about their own gender, as well as the other gender. It was the third task, however, that provided food for thought on children’s preferences. They asked children to decide on six toys and arrange them in a line according to the most desirable, the next most desirable, and so on. Next, they presented children with three collages supposedly made by other children of the same age. They asked them to choose two collages as the “nicest” and the “next nicest”. The chosen collages would receive rewards from the range of the toys that were judged before on the desirability basis. Also, the chosen collages were presented by the experimenter to be the collaborative work of a group of girls, one of the two, and a group of boys, the other. Each child, in the final part of the experiment, had to choose one of the toys as a reward for “the nicest” and one for the “next nicest” collage (p. 187). They found that children were able to make gender categorizations and classifications, themselves included. Furthermore, boys made evaluative collage judgments according to performance and based more on the equity principle, whereas girls awarded more prizes to girl effort and spoke less favourably about boys than vice versa. What is it that makes girls more gender-oriented than boys? There are several explanations for that phenomenon. The psychodynamic perspective traces it back to the early Oedipal phase, just before the age of four, which is more defensive and rigid for girls, due to the castration anxiety experienced by them. Because girls soon realize that they will never going to possess a penis, the symbol of power, they are guided by envy for the opposite sex. This envy leads them to fantasize and exercise power whenever possible, in an effort to gain a sense of autonomy and find their way

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to the outside world. Freud called it sexual chauvinism, that compensates for the narcissistic loss (Benjamin, 1995). Maccoby and Jacklin also believe in the defensive measure taken by girls against the self-assured play styles adopted by boys (Maccoby and Jacklin, 1987, as cited in Yee and Brown, 1994). In the mid 60’s, following the teachings of the cognitive-developmental theory, Kohlberg composed a paper in which he claimed that gender concepts are self-constructed and not imposed and motivate children to act appropriately. Martin and Halverson, in the 80’s, proposed a schematic processing model by which children are thought to process first a general “in-group/out-group” schema and then a more detailed schema of their own sex. Together with the Social Identity theory, these two models suggest that differentiation is achieved through ingroup-outgroup comparison (as cited in Yee and Brown, 1994). A study by Markovits, Benenson, and Dolenszky (2001) examined whether children’s internal representations reflect interaction, interconnection and intimacy in friendships. If so, they hypothesized, then gender differences must be internally encoded in a cognitive structure for peer interaction. Overall, 278 children from preschool to junior college participated as subjects. Materials included questionnaires with rating or comparison tasks about “typical” girls/boys in several social situations (p. 880). Peer interactions represented internally, were found to be partially gender specific. The researchers concluded that “ although girls and boys might interact in segregated contexts, they are able to encode the major differences in behaviour that characterize each others’ interactions” (p. 884). These

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differences drawn form experience are, in turn, used as a means of processing and interpreting subsequent experience. Bigler, Brown, and Markell (2001) comprised a study to examine the effects of group status on children’s intergroup attitudes. They hypothesized that children would show intergroup bias if the experiment made their social groups perceptually salient. What is more, high-status groups would end up more biased than low-status groups. They used 91 summer school students as subjects. There were three conditions: a posters only and a posters plus functional use condition, where posters were contained in different classrooms. T-shirts, corresponding to two groups, were given to children. There were yellow group shirts and blue group shirts. Posters had also colours consistent with each group. Posters were supposed to link colour group to higher and lower status attributes. In the third condition, there were no posters. In the posters plus functional use condition, teachers’ use of social groups in a functional way, helped in the formation of intergroup bias. That is, where group status was both salient and used, there was rivalry. In the other two conditions, where teachers didn’t manipulate attributes, no in-group or out-group biases were found. Another important finding was that when evaluation of the in-group vs. the out-group was involved, low-status children rated the in-group and the out-group evenly. This last finding was consistent with the results of other studies in which children were not found biased against an out-group, after having been told that this out-group performed better in tasks.

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Bigler et al. believe that children will not necessarily form biases in the absence of environmental cues. They also cite previous research on the Social Identity Theory. Self-esteem and classification skills moderate the formation of intergroup biases, as resulted from additional analyses in her experiment. How do such intergroup attitudes evolve then? Socialization, says Bennett, it can even be called social influence (Emler and Dickinson), group practices and representations that encourage cultural exchanges (D’ Andrade), or put simply, “banal nationalism” (Billig), the ongoing transmission of legendary stories about one’s own nation, that are meant to enhance devotion (as cited in Bennett, Sani, Lyons, & Barrett, 1998). Powlishta, Serbin, Doyle, and White (1994) were interested in whether prejudice can be generalised as to become a characteristic that differentiates children. They found no evidence for that in their experiment. They showed however, that bias against out-groups does exist, although it declines with age. A more thorough investigation is needed in order to clarify whether children’s biases can expand to several domains or else be transformed into more generalised patterns. This investigation is important for intervention on the reduction of prejudice purposes. Experimental research has shown that very young children may set out to play with their classmates and end up rejecting one or many of them for reasons that indicate prejudice. Familiarity or self-esteem reasons may lead young kids to prefer one group to another. Then, experiments suggest, even at its most undeveloped forms, prejudice is present. But do the tests employed by experiments speak the truth? They may not be as valid as we

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would like them to be, Aboud (1988) says. Behaviour is not always indicative of prejudice. Simplicity and the personality of the respondent may defeat the results. Two children may simply be friends, instead of preferred playmates (p. 61). Experimental demand and a need for approval may make a class perform outstandingly well in the presence of an examiner. Dolls are not people and familiarization with classmates gives rise to extraneous factors that have to be minimised before we jump into conclusions. One of the most controversial arguments on the assessment of fondness, however, comes from forced-choice tests. Children are obliged to choose one group over another, whereas they may like or, conversely, dislike more that one. The degree and the reason of their negative attitudes often remain unanswered. Still, it is generally believed that some form of prejudice can be found in children. Does it follow from the above that prejudice is inevitable? The inevitability of prejudice scenario predicts that it is somehow inherited. As mentioned earlier, once stereotypes are applied to members of a group – and often that happens heuristically – prejudice follows (Devine, 1989). However, presence of prejudice doesn’t entail acceptance. Devine shows how stereotype activation can be automatic, that is unintentional and spontaneous, but also how controlled processes can inhibit this activation. Her model challenges the position that prejudice at a control level is inevitable. Devine says that controlled processes may have limited capacity but the fact that they are used in decision making and the initiation of new behaviours, proves their flexibility and practicality. Through them, people who decide that stereotypes are inappropriate, create cognitive structures that represent new beliefs and, then, activate these structures. At the same time,

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they suppress the automatically activated stereotypes and replace them with more egalitarian beliefs (Devine, and Monteith, 1999). This attempt to suppress stereotypes, distinguishes between low-prejudiced and highprejudiced people, she concludes. Inevitability, then, falls to the cognitive skills of the individual. Devine’s model has been challenged by several researchers. She does not demonstrate how the choice made by low-prejudiced people, as to respond in a different way to stereotypic thoughts than high-prejudiced people, can be represented cognitively. Nor does she end up with an optimistic message about the abolition of prejudice, for controlled prejudice is still prejudice in one piece. Lepore and Brown (1997) examined the boundaries among categorization, stereotyping and prejudice for an explanation. They found them to be flexible. The extent to which a person supports a stereotype will determine his/her judgment of whether to use it or not. People, then, make judgments based on categories or stereotypes. Lepore and Brown’s results showed that high- and low-prejudiced people respond in a different way only when the category and not the stereotype is primed. Therefore, inhibition of a stereotype may not be necessary for a lowprejudiced person in the first place. As they concluded: “Prejudice does not resemble a habit that has to be broken but one that is, for some people, already broken” (p. 285). Even in the cases of stereotype suppression, however, success is not guaranteed. Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, and Jetten (1994) believe that suppressing stereotypic thoughts may have the opposite effect. In three experiments, they considered the extent to which formerly unwanted

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stereotypic thoughts reappear, after an act of suppression. Following Wegner and Erber’s model of mental control, the detection of an unwanted thought by someone who wishes to suppress it, will be followed by scanning for a distracter item that will replace the original thought. Macrae et al. take this model further. Combining it with well-established research on priming and the synapse model of construct accessibility of Higgins, they show how this monitoring process can in fact prime unwanted thoughts, making them “hyperaccessible” for perceivers, the so-called rebound effect. In spite of everything, Devine and other researchers might not exactly have children in mind when talking about initiative in surpassing stereotypic beliefs. Prejudice in all its glory cannot be detected by children nor can a kid be on familiar terms with the ways to stop it. So, where exactly does inevitability rest then? Does it go hand in hand with the first symptoms of a child choosing a White instead of a Black doll to play with? Is development leading to inevitable truths about the human nature or does the word “inevitable” suggest something that gradually develops to become abhorrent? The argument on the inevitability of prejudice rests on the fallacy that what is common must be true. Yet, if prejudice is too sophisticated a word to be associated with children, as Aboud (1988) said, how can it be called “common”? Can trouble-free categorization demonstrated by children be a warning for prejudice? Unless biologically based, any learned response or cantankerous reaction should not be regarded as inescapable. It can be that category preferences denote latent prejudice but still nothing guarantees that discriminatory responses will one day blossom out of them. So the problem is really for researchers to agree on the point beyond which something may be

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considered inevitable, although if indeed existent throughout early development, prejudice can still be whitewashed so as not to attain maturity, in a way modified to suit children. A second consideration pertains to the nature of prejudice per se. Is prejudice static or does it change, influenced by concurrent societal and individual norms? People have become tolerant towards many things over the last few years and parents will not pass derogatory habits around to their children with the same ease. To say that prejudice is inevitable here, means to take education too lightly in an era when we are infested by informational refutations. Prejudice has become too multidimensional to be seen as fatalistic altogether. A more thorough investigation on the matter of developmental bias is required for possible inferences to come out. Researchers must first resolve the issue underlying the philosophy of inevitability. At the moment it seems as if theoreticians are only hypothesizing while children-unable to verbalize their selections-fall prey to erroneous beliefs.

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References Aboud, F. (1988). Children and Prejudice. Oxford: Blackwell. Benjamin, J. (1995). Like Subjects, Love Objects. London: Yale University Press. Bennett, M., Sani, F., Lyons, E., & Barrett, M. (1998). Children’s Subjective Identification With the Group and In-Group Favoritism. Developmental Psychology, 5, 902-909. Bigler, R. S., Brown, C. S., & Markell, M. (2001). When Groups Are Not Created Equal: Effects of Group Status on the Formation of Intergroup Attitudes in Children. Child Development, 72(4), 1151-1162. Brown, R. (1995). Prejudice: Its social psychology. Oxford: Blackwell. Devine, P. G. (1989). Stereotypes and Prejudice: Their Automatic and Controlled Components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 5-18. Devine, P. G., & Monteith, M. J. (1999). Automaticity and Control in Stereotyping. In S. Chaiken & Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual process theories in social psychology (pp. 339-360). New York: Guilford. Freud, A. (1972). The ego and the mechanisms of defence. London: The Hogarth Press LTD. Lepore, L., & Brown, R. (1997). Category and Stereotype Activation: Is Prejudice Inevitable? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(2), 275-287.

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Macrae, C. N., Bodenhausen, G. V., Milne, A. B., Jetten, J. (1994). Out of mind but back in sight: stereotypes on the rebound. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 808-817. Markovits, H., Benenson, J., & Dolenszky, E. (2001). Evidence That Children and Adolescents Have Internal Models of Peer Interactions That Are Gender Differentiated. Child Development, 72(3), 879-886. Powlishta, K. K., Serbin, L., Doyle, A. B., & White, D. R. (1994). Gender Ethnic and Body Type Biases: The Generality of Prejudice in Childhood. Developmental Psychology, 30, 526-536. Sluckin, W. (1972). Imprinting and Early Learning. London: Methuen. Verkuyten, M., Masson, K., & Elffers, H. (1995). Racial categorization and preference among older children in The Netherlands. European Journal of Social Psychology, 25, 637-656. Yee, M., & Brown, R. (1994). The development of gender differentiation in young children. British Journal of Social Psychology, 33, 183-196.