Special issue article How social experience is related to children’s intergroup attitudes

Intergroup attitudes were assessed in 7 and 10 years old European American and African American children from ethnically heterogeneous schools and in 7 and 10 years old European American children from ethnically homogeneous schools in order to test hypotheses about racial biases and judgments regarding cross-race peer interactions (N1⁄4 302). Using an Ambiguous Situations Task, the findings revealed that European American children attending homogeneous schools displayed racial bias in their interpretations of ambiguous situations as well as in their evaluations of cross-race friendship. Bias was not found, however, in the interpretations and evaluations of European American or African American children from heterogeneous schools. This study is the first to empirically demonstrate significant and direct relationships between intergroup contact in the school environment and children’s intergroup biases as well as judgments about the potential for cross-race friendships. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Research on children’s intergroup attitudes continues to evolve and expand our understanding of the roots and development of bias relating to another’s group membership. As research on implicit bias in adults has produced impressive findings and gained much media attention in the past decade (see Dovidio, Kawakami, & Beach, 2001; Gaertner & Dovidio, 2005; Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2005), recent work examining the developmental origins and trajectory of implicit bias has opened a new window of understanding of children’s intergroup attitudes (see Banaji, Baron, Olson, & Dunham, 2008; Baron & Banaji, 2006; Dunham, Baron, & Banaji, 2006; Rutland, 2004; Rutland, Cameron, Milne, & McGeorge, 2005). Implicit bias has been most commonly measured in adults using the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995), which is a computer-based assessment of the association of positive or negative adjectives to faces. Recently, studies using the IAT with children have demonstrated the presence of implicit bias in European American children as young as six with little or no change in these attitudes with age (Baron & Banaji, 2006; Dunham et al., 2006; Rutland et al., 2005; Sinclair, Dunn, & Lowery, 2005). Studies assessing explicit intergroup attitudes, commonly in the form of forced-choice trait assignment (i.e., children are asked to assign positive and negative adjectives to pictures of White or Black characters), have found that explicit intergroup attitudes become more egalitarian with age (see Bigler & Liben, 1993; Doyle & Aboud, 1995). Using this methodology, findings reveal that young European American children assign positive traits to their own group and negative traits to the other group, while older European American children assign positive and negative traits to both groups. Thus, young children display bias on both implicit and explicit bias assessments, while older children continue to European Journal of Social Psychology Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 40, 625–634 (2010) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.733 *Correspondence to: Heidi McGlothlin. E-mail: [email protected] **Correspondence to: Melanie Killen, Department of Human Development, 3304 Benjamin Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA. E-mail: [email protected] Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 30 June 2009 Accepted 21 November 2009 show implicit bias but report fewer explicit biases. What remains to be investigated is when and how bias, implicit or explicit, manifests in children’s decision-making about interracial peer encounters. The focus of the present study, in contrast to the work with the IAT and explicit assessments, was to examine intergroup attitudes, using direct and indirect methods, about children’s everyday social lives, and as a function of their social experience with members of outgroups. To test children’s intergroup attitudes, typical peer situations depicting a potential wrongdoing involving either a Black transgressor or a White transgressor were shown to children for their interpretation of the motives of the characters. Bias was measured by assessing differences in interpretations of the situations based on race of the transgressor (unbeknownst to the participant). What makes this methodology different from the IAT is that bias is measured in the context of peer encounters rather than as an association between adjectives and faces. Moreover, the Ambiguous Situations Task involves reflective judgments, even though the participant is unaware of the measure of interracial bias. This measure is referred to as an indirect measure of bias rather than as an implicit measure, which refers to unconscious, automatic processes (see Killen, McGlothlin, & Henning, 2008, for a comparison of implicit and indirect measures of bias in childhood). Past research using a similar methodology revealed biases but had limitations with sampling and stimulus items (Lawrence, 1991; Sagar & Schofield, 1980; for a review of the sampling limitations, see McGlothlin, Killen, & Edmonds, 2005). A recent line of research demonstrated that European American children enrolled in homogeneous schools displayed negative racial bias when interpreting intentions in ambiguous interracial peer encounters (McGlothlin & Killen, 2006). Bias was not found, however, in the responses of European American children enrolled in heterogeneous schools (McGlothlin et al., 2005). While evidence of bias was found for African American children enrolled in heterogeneous schools in that behaviors of White transgressors were rated as worse than behaviors of Black transgressors on one question, bias was not found in the responses of other ethnic minority (i.e., Latino American and Asian American) children (Margie, Killen, Sinno, & McGlothlin, 2005). Although these studies provided information regarding how children, from both ethnic majority and ethnic minority backgrounds, evaluate ambiguous cross-race peer encounters, a direct comparison between these samples of children and between both forms of school experience (heterogeneous and homogeneous) regarding the attribution of negative intentions in interracial peer encounters has not been conducted. This is important as it will provide new evidence regarding the role of social experience. Does the diversity of the school environment relate to children’s evaluations of cross-race peer interactions? As is well known, social psychologists have long theorized that increased intergroup contact, under the right conditions, can improve intergroup attitudes and relations (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2005). The majority of these studies, however, included college students as participants and examined contact on group membership categories such as college major, nationality, or artificial groups, with few studies actually examining interracial peer group contact, especially in early childhood. A significant body of work has examined intergroup contact as a function of school desegregation (see Kurlaender & Yun, 2001; Stephan, 2002). These findings have been mixed, however, due to the global measurements used to assess attitudes as well as to the complexity in assessing the quality of intergroup contact in forced desegregated school environments (see Stephan, 2002, for the limitations of this research). In the present study, we collected data from three samples of young children (European American and African American children attending ethnically heterogeneous schools and European American children attending ethnically homogeneous schools). As well as examining the impact of school environment on children’s interpretations of interracial encounters, a direct comparison of these three samples of children will also determine whether the bias found in responses of European American children attending homogeneous schools is a form of outgroup negativity or of ingroup bias, a distinction important for designing prejudice reduction programs, and not known without a scientifically designed comparison. In order to further examine the distinction between ingroup and outgroup bias, African American children from ethnically heterogeneous schools, but not Latino American or Asian American children from Margie et al. (2005) were included in the current analyses. Thus, for all children, the characters depicted in the ambiguous situations represented the ingroup or the outgroup. Moreover, because ethnicity differences have only been examined within the sample of ethnic minority children (African American, Latino, and Asian American), the current study is the first to report any differences between European American and African American children’s interpretations of ambiguous interracial encounters. In addition to examining children’s attributions of intentions, another goal of the current study was to examine children’s decision-making about cross-race friendships as a function of social experience. Cross-race friendships are one of the most influential types of intergroup contact in terms of the positive impact on racial attitudes (Tropp & Prenovost, Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 40, 625–634 (2010) DOI: 10.1002/ejsp 626 Heidi McGlothlin and Melanie Killen