Prejudice and the Organization of Young Children's Knowledge

小行星9319796 本研究探讨了认知和社会概念形成中的两个基本问题：（1）幼儿使用什么原则来组织社会世界的知识，（2）是什么塑造了幼儿的社会刻板印象？ 很小的孩子对社会世界表现出自发的好奇心，并且似乎比以前的研究人员所认为的更深入地推理。他们还对某些社会群体的成员形成了持久的偏见。 虽然有些孩子利用社会推理的策略，重点是行为的人之间，其他人强调非明显的和“本质主义”的共同点的方式，平行于儿童的期望自然种类。 本研究探讨了一个重要但尚未探索的问题：幼儿如何利用对自然世界的理论式欣赏来扩展他们对社会世界的理解。 本研究探讨是否有不同程度的偏见作为一个功能如何广泛的儿童的期望社会差异的形成自然类推理和自然类类在帮助儿童超越相似的外观在他们的社会理解中发挥的作用。种族和种族主义与美国社会面临的几乎每一个主要社会问题都有联系。 这些问题涉及到贫穷的再现、学业成绩不佳和不同的患病率等。 以前的大多数报告认为，儿童在学习偏见方面扮演着被动的角色;儿童通过接触种族主义信息而获得种族主义。 本研究挑战了这种假设的学习过程，调查儿童是否在构建他们获得的知识中发挥更积极的作用。因此，它把偏见的学习更多地比作语言学习，而不是代数学习。 就像语言一样，偏见可能易学难忘。通过增加我们对偏见的本质及其背后的心理过程的理解，目前的研究将使我们更好地减少偏见。

9319796 Hirschfeld This research investigates two basic questions in cognition and social concept formation: (1) What principles do young children use to organize knowledge of the social world, and (2) What shapes young children's social stereotypes? Very young children show a spontaneous curiosity about the social world, and appear to reason about it more deeply than previous researchers suggest. They also develop enduring prejudices about members of some social groups. While some children utilize a social reasoning strategy that focuses on behavioral regularities among people, others emphasize nonobvious and 'essentialist' commonalities in a manner that parallels children's expectations about natural kinds. This research examines an important but unexplored issue: how young children enlist theory-like appreciation of the natural world to extend their understanding of the social world. The research examines whether levels of prejudice vary as a function of how extensively children's expectations about social differences are shaped by natural kind reasoning and the role played by natural kind categories in helping children go beyond similarities in appearance in their social understanding. Race and racism are linked to almost every major social problem facing American society. They are implicated in issues ranging from the reproduction of poverty, to underachievement in schools, to differential rates of illness. Most previous accounts see the child playing a passive role in learning prejudice; children acquire racism by virtue of encountering racist messages. This research challenges this assumed learning process, investigating whether children play a more active role in constructing the knowledge they acquire. As such, it likens the learning of prejudice more to language learning than to algebra learning. Like language, prejudice may be easy to learn and difficult to forget. By increasing our understanding of the nature of prejudice and th e psychological processes underlying it, the present research will place us in a better position to reduce it. ***