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The present research applies Devine's (1989) distinction between stereotype knowledge and personal beliefs to the early development of racial bias in young children. The responses of 110 South Australian children (66 girls and 44 boys) toward white and black stimuli were examined across the 5-6 and 8-9 age groups. Analyses revealed that both age groups were knowledgeable about the cultural stereotypes associated with black and white skin colour. Negative adjectives were more strongly endorsed for black stimuli than were positive adjectives (the reverse was true for white stimuli). For 5- to 6-year-olds, knowledge of stereotypes and personal beliefs for black stimuli were highly congruent. In contrast, children aged 8-9 years were significantly more likely to report personal beliefs which diverged from their knowledge of pervasive cultural stereotypes, i.e. to endorse negative adjectives as stereotype knowledge rather than personal beliefs. It is tentatively concluded that the concordance of personal beliefs and stereotype knowledge found among very young children is not prejudice as typically conceived, but rather a function of their inability to make personal judgments that diverge from dominant stereotypes. In contrast, older children have an increasing ability to base evaluations on personal beliefs that may be inconsistent with collective societal representations of social groups. Various explanations accounting for the differentiation between personal beliefs and stereotype knowledge in older children are discussed.
The systematic inquiry into the development of racial prejudice in children has a wellestablished research tradition in psychology. Aboud's (1988) review of 20 years of research in this field concluded that children as young as 3-4 years of age demonstrate ethnic and racial awareness, with finer discriminative and conceptual skills developing thereafter. Children are able to discriminate between black and white human stimuli, assign racial labels and identify which one looks most like them. Moreover, a child becomes aware of these differences without knowledge of racial concepts or racial classifications (Clark & Clark, 1947; Goodman, 1964; Williams, Best, & Boswell 1975a, 1975b; Vaughan, 1964).
Perhaps the most consistent finding is that majority-group children display a preference for white as opposed to black skin colour cues. There is a pronounced tendency by majority-group children to assign positive or favourable characteristics to white-skinned human stimuli and negative characteristics to black-skinned stimuli (Asher & Allen, 1969;...