Developmental Psychology in Obedience/Prejudice

2 Key excerpts on "Developmental Psychology in Obedience/Prejudice"

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  eBook - ePub

  Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination

  • Mary E. Kite, Bernard E. Whitley, Jr., Lisa S. Wagner(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Although we have discussed a number of factors that can influence children’s development of stereotypes and prejudice, the bottom line is, we do not yet have a good understanding of how children turn into either prejudiced or nonprejudiced adults (Aboud & Amato, 2001). One reason is that, traditionally, the study of prejudice has been the domain of social psychologists and the study of cognitive and social development has been the domain of developmental psychologists, and the two groups have rarely collaborated to study the development of prejudice (S. R. Levy & Killen, 2008). That situation is changing, so the future should bring a better understanding of how prejudice develops.

  A Pause to Reflect  Here are some questions to help you review and think about the material in this section.

  • Explain the role that essentialism plays in the development of prejudice in children.
  • According to social learning theories of prejudice, children can be taught prejudice both directly and indirectly. Give one example of direct teaching of prejudice and one example of indirect teaching of prejudice. Which type of teaching do you think is more influential in the development of prejudice? Explain the reasons for your answer.
  • Use Duckitt’s (2001; Duckitt & Sibley, 2017) model to explain how child-rearing practices affect personality and prejudice.
  • Explain the roles parents, peer groups, and media play in the development of prejudice in children.
  • We focused on how intergroup development theory can explain racial and ethnic prejudice. How do you think that theory would explain the development of gender and sexual orientation prejudice?

  Reducing Children’s Prejudice

  Having seen how prejudice can develop in children, we now turn to interventions designed to reduce or prevent the development of prejudice in children. Most of the research on this topic has focused on intergroup contact in schools, so that will also be our focus.

  Intergroup Contact

  You will recall from our discussion of patterns of prejudice development that majority group children who have more contact with minority group children express less prejudice than those who have had less intergroup contact. For example, in a longitudinal study of U.S. children Larissa Gaias and colleagues (2018) found that preschoolers who had more intergroup contact made more cross-race friendships in first grade and had less prejudiced attitudes and more cross-race friendships in third grade. This positive effect of intergroup contact has been found in a number of countries including Canada, Chile, China, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Serbia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Gu et al., 2016; Hewstone et al., 2014; Skinner & Meltzoff, 2019). Contact with people with disabilities and with older adults also improves children’s attitudes toward members of those groups (Armstrong et al., 2017; Bergman, 2017).

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  eBook - ePub

  An Introduction to Child Development

  • Thomas Keenan, Subhadra Evans, Kevin Crowley(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  The world abounds with budding psychologists. The fact that you are sitting down right now reading this text suggests that you may be one yourself. At the least, you are likely to be interested in understanding yourself or any number of other people, including your parents, siblings, friends or even children in general. How can we best gain insight into our own and our family members’ past actions and predict their future behaviour, emotions and cognitions? The field of psychology, in general, and developmental psychology, in particular, is concerned with these very questions. We hope, through reading and studying this text, you will gain greater awareness of a number of important psychological questions, including how we develop and grow as a fetus from the very beginning, to how children learn about moral behaviour, and what happens when things go wrong with typical development. As you will discover, there are still many unanswered questions, but we are increasingly expanding on the knowledge of previous generations of psychologists. Perhaps you will become one of the very scientists working so hard to fill in the gaps of our knowledge about human development.

  Life-span developmental psychology is the field of psychology which involves the examination of both constancy and change in human behaviour across the entire life span, that is, from conception to death (Baltes, 1987). Table 1.1 below shows the age periods that child development is typically divided into. Developmental psychologists are concerned with diverse issues, ranging from the growth of motor skills in the infant to the gains and losses observed in the intellectual functioning of the elderly. The goal of study in developmental psychology is to further our knowledge about how development evolves over the life span, developing a knowledge of the general principles of development and the differences and similarities in development across individuals. The range of topics comprising the study of modern psychology is vast, and encompasses sub-areas as diverse as social psychology, comparative psychology, the study of learning, neuropsychology, abnormal psychology, and cognitive psychology. However, the study of development is possible within each of these areas. Thus, in one sense, developmental psychology can be thought of as an approach that one takes to the broader study of psychology (Buss, 1995).

  This text focuses on a relatively narrow portion of the life span, specifically the time development between conception and adolescence. This area of study is known as the study of child development

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