Prejudice and the Organization of Young Children's Knowledge

9319796 Hirschfeld这项研究调查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对社会世界的知识，以及(2)是什么形成了幼儿的社会刻板印象？年幼的儿童对社交世界表现出自发的好奇心，而且对此的推理似乎比之前的研究人员所说的更深刻。他们还对一些社会群体的成员产生持久的偏见。虽然一些儿童使用社会推理策略，专注于人与人之间的行为规则，但另一些儿童则强调不明显的“本质主义”共性，其方式与儿童对自然类型的期望相一致。这项研究考察了一个重要但尚未探索的问题：年幼的儿童如何像理论一样欣赏自然世界，以扩展他们对社会世界的理解。这项研究考察了偏见水平是否随着儿童对社会差异的期望在多大程度上受到自然善良推理的影响而变化，以及自然善良类别在帮助儿童在社交理解中超越外表相似方面所起的作用。种族和种族主义几乎与美国社会面临的所有重大社会问题有关。他们牵涉到一系列问题，从贫困的再现，到学校成绩不佳，再到不同的发病率。大多数以前的说法认为，儿童在学习偏见方面扮演着被动的角色；儿童通过遇到种族主义信息而获得种族主义。这项研究挑战了这种假设的学习过程，调查了儿童是否在构建他们获得的知识方面发挥了更积极的作用。因此，它将偏见的学习比作语言学习，而不是代数学习。就像语言一样，偏见可能很容易学会，但很难忘记。通过增加我们对偏见的本质和其背后的心理过程的理解，本研究将使我们处于更好的位置来减少它。***

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. ***