Beliefs on prejudice shape kids’ openness to diversity

Those raising children are typically keen to make sure that young ones interact with those from different cultural and racial backgrounds. Some research, however, suggests that kids begin engaging less with those of other races between the ages of 8 and 10. Why exactly this happens is still an open question.

In an effort to better understand this phenomenon, new research from a US-based team explores whether prejudice theories (thinking prejudice is fixed or malleable) may play a part in kids' willingness to develop interracial friendships. The team's analyses suggest that children who see prejudice as malleable are more interested in interacting with a partner of a different race — a finding which could open up potential interventions for teachers and caregivers who want to ensure children remain open to diversity in their friendships. 

The team's first study recruited 152 students aged between 8 and 13 years old from public and private schools in California. In the first stage, children were asked to create a video message to be sent to a child at a different school, and were shown an image of their partner. White children were shown a Black partner, while Asian, Latinx, and Black children were shown a White partner. 

After making their video, the kids answered questions about their expectations of how their interaction might go, and how much they felt the other child might like them. They also completed measures of the diversity of their friendships, and how interested they were in engaging with their partner again. One week after that, participants completed measures probing to what extent they felt prejudice was fixed or malleable, as well as those on implicit racial prejudice, racial anxiety, loneliness, and self-esteem. The team also coded participants' videos for verbal and non-verbal signs of friendliness and interest in decreasing interpersonal distance. 

As expected, participants with a more malleable view of prejudice reported more interest in engaging in interracial interactions, had more diversity in their friendship, and had less interracial anxiety. Malleable views of prejudice also predicted more interest in engaging with their partner in the future, though this was only significant among older children. 

In younger children, prejudice theories were not related to verbal or non-verbal behaviour in the video recordings, though in older children malleable views of prejudice were again associated with more approachable verbal and non-verbal behaviour. Taken together, these results suggest that seeing prejudice as able to shift and change is linked to more interest in interracial friendship, and that this is particularly true for older children. 

The second study manipulated theories of prejudice to understand their impact on real interactions between children of different races. For this leg of the research, children (the number of which was not reported) aged between 10 and 12 were again recruited from schools in California. Those from White majority schools were randomly assigned to read a story about civil rights describing malleable or fixed prejudice, and to then interact with a child of the same or a different race from a more diverse school. In the malleable condition, children read that changes in prejudice are both possible and important, while those in the fixed condition read that laws can change but prejudice, deep down, cannot. 

The kids then connected with another participant, were told to introduce themselves and share a fun fact, after which the pair discussed healthy eating and race relations. After the conversation, participants indicated whether they would be interested in future interactions with their partner, and shared their impressions of them. In this study, the research team also analysed the children's 'nonverbal synchrony' — how similar body language, posture, and conversational tempo was between partners. 

Of the participants paired with a partner of a different race, those who were exposed to a story of malleability were more likely than those hearing the story of fixed prejudice to indicate interest in future interactions. There was no such difference in same-race interactions. Those who heard about malleable prejudice also showed similar levels of synchrony, whether or not they were partnered with someone of the same race. As in the first study, these patterns suggest that holding a malleable theory of prejudice increased children's interest in interracial interaction. 

Overall, the research provides two widely useful findings. Firstly, prejudice theories may play a part in the decrease in interracial friendships in childhood. Secondly, the findings suggest that interventions which stress that prejudice is malleable, rather than fixed, could have real life impact on willingness to engage across racial lines. Such interventions could provide caregivers and educators with a practical way to approach prejudice which more easily steers children in a direction of growth.  

There are some limitations to this research. For instance, in the second study, only students at White majority schools received the intervention. Future research including both children from more diverse backgrounds would be informative. Perhaps most pertinently, data analysed in this study was collected over ten years ago. Recent discussions on race and racism, particularly in the context of Black Lives Matter, may have changed both the way today's children interact across racial lines and how they think about prejudice, limiting the generalisability of these findings. Replication attempts with more current data could provide further insight. 

Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13233