Children and social groups: A developmental analysis of implicit consistency in Hispanic Americans

Abstract

We investigated the development of three aspects of implicit social cognition (selfesteem, group identity, and group attitude) and their interrelationships in Hispanic American children (ages 5 to 12) and adults. Hispanic children and adults showed positive implicit self-esteem and a preference for and identification with their ingroup when the comparison group was another disadvantaged minority group (African American). However, challenging the long-held view that children's early intergroup attitudes are primarily egocentric, young Hispanic children do not show implicit preference for or identification with their in-group when the comparison was the more advantaged White majority. Results also supported predictions of cognitive-affective balance in the youngest children. Strikingly, balance was absent in adults, suggesting that in disadvantaged minority groups, cognitive-affective consistency may actually decline with age.

Two Signatures of Implicit Intergroup Attitudes

“…Lastly, although ingroup preference may be a general phenomenon, it is not inevitable; an important boundary condition is revealed when we shift to focus on the socially disadvantaged, for whom cues to group-based social status are influential from the earliest moments of social categorization. While other research has also SIGNATURES OF IMPLICIT INTERGROUP ATTITUDES 16 reported a lack of implicit ingroup preference in non-White children (Dunham et al, 2007;Newheiser & Olson, 2012), our inclusion of younger children and our direct comparison between majority and minority populations provides a stricter test of both age invariance and status internalization.…”

“…For members of stigmatized cultural minorities, like Black and Latino Americans, this ingroup favoring pattern is not consistently shown, especially on automatic or implicit measures (Dunham et al, 2007;Newheiser & Olson, in press;Nosek et al, 2002). Will members of a disadvantaged group initially show a preference for their own group, which is then drummed out through subsequent learning?…”

“…However, other research has revealed a constraint on this otherwise ubiquitous pattern: Members of socially disadvantaged groups do not consistently demonstrate ingroup preference, especially on measures of implicit social cognition thought to tap lower-level evaluative associations (Bettencourt, Dorr, Charlton, & Hume, 2001;Clark & Clark, 1947;Dunham, Baron, & Banaji, 2007;Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004;Mullen, Brown, & Smith, 2001;Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002). Thus, social status appears to counteract what is otherwise a general tendency towards ingroup preference, presumably through a protracted process of social tuning and enculturation to local norms (Bandura, 1977;Davey, 1983;Devine, 1989).…”

The Importance of Origins: Why Cognitive Development is Central to a Mature Understanding of Social Cognition

“…Our data favor the latter, category-based bias, model. Studies of implicit race and gender bias in several child populations in both the US and abroad (where histories of exposure would seem to be quite different) have nearly always shown early implicit bias of a magnitude similar to that found in adults [45][46][47][48]. More recently, we found a form of implicit race bias in children as young as 3 that remained stable into adulthood [49].…”

Development and psychometric validation of a child Racial Attitudes Index (RAI)

“…What is more, and the focus of this paper, the single-target, singleperceiver instruments cannot effectively model or showcase the nuances that we have described in terms of US Black and Latina/o children that are known to exist in the literature. In fact, all the studies that demonstrate these nuanced ingroup and outgroup attitudes rely on instruments that provide at least two types of targets (e.g., Baron & Banaji, 2009;Dunham et al, 2007). Accordingly, to effectively model the fuller range of perceiver and target dynamics, researchers should develop an instrument that includes at least two targets.…”