Essentialism Promotes Children's Inter-ethnic Bias

• Main Authors: Gil eDiesendruck, Roni eMenahem
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2015-08-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: Children; attitudes; ethnicity; essentialism; social categories
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01180/full

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.