A kid's eye view of race and status

Abstract:

By 4 years of age, many children in the United States express awareness of racial stereotypes about social status, often expecting White people to live in nicer houses and have nicer possessions than Black people. Racial stereotypes about status are important because they are hypothesized to lay the foundation for prejudice and discrimination towards minoritized groups. However, little work has examined how racial stereotypes about status develop. In this talk I will describe three studies that examine whether stereotype expression is related to community racial or economic characteristics (Study 1), and ask whether developmental changes in basic cognitive processes might determine whether community characteristics affect stereotype development at all (Studies 2 and 3). The talk will conclude with a discussion of the limitations of current methods, and a call for more inclusive research that explores the development of status cognition across children from a wide range of social and economic backgrounds.