Children's and Adolescents' Racial Biases about Peer Relationships

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The goals of this project are to investigate children's intergroup bias regarding peer relationships in familiar, everyday situations. Using direct assessments, previous research has shown that children evaluate racial exclusion as wrong using moral reasons in straightforward situations (Killen, Lee-Kim, McGlothlin, & Stangor, 2002). In complex or ambiguous situations, children often use a mixture of reasons, such as group functioning or personal choice to justify exclusion. The present studies will examine the ways in which children display implicit and explicit racial biases. Studies with adults have shown that while explicit biases have diminished dramatically over 50 years, implicit biases are still quite prevalent (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986). Most of this research has not employed measurements that are developmentally appropriate for children; nor do they assess bias in the context of peer situations. Pilot work for the present study established the reliability and validity of two assessments for investigating implicit racial bias in children using ambiguous pictures cards and perceptions of similarity measurements. These instruments will be used in the present investigation to assess children's evaluations of contexts involving cross-race peer relationships. Using the social-cognitive domain model, this research will investigate whether and how children apply racial biases to their interpretations of ambiguous picture cards with cross-race peer dyads, to their perceptions of similarity, and to their judgments about the potential for cross-race friendships. In this assessment, social encounters are depicted that reflect everyday, familiar, social contexts for children, such as situations on the playground, at the park, and in the school yard. In addition, this research will examine how the ethnic make-up of children's school environments influences the extent to which children apply racial biases to decisions about peer relationships. Further, children's implicit and explicit bias will be examined in order to understand whether children who do not demonstrate explicit bias, nonetheless, exhibit implicit biases when asked to make judgments about peer relationships.This research will investigate whether, and how, children take race into account when making decisions about peer encounters in morally-relevant peer relationship contexts. One study will focus primarily on implicit biases from children attending different schools (homogeneous and heterogeneous), and a second study will use multiple measures to understand the relationships between implicit and explicit intergroup judgments. Given that previous work has shown that different forms of social reasoning are used when evaluating peer contexts, this research will seek to determine if racial biases are brought into consideration when evaluating peer exchanges, guided by developmental social-cognitive domain theory. The knowledge resulting from this project will enable educators, school psychologists, and school professionals to develop curriculum and intervention programs to address issues of intergroup tensions, and diversity in schools in a developmentally meaningful way. Given the multicultural nature of the workforce and adult world, it is essential to facilitate children's ability to interact comfortably with individuals from diverse backgrounds; a first step towards this goal is understanding when and how children's intergroup biases manifest in various social contexts and situations, and that is the central aim of this investigation.