The Science of Reducing Prejudice in Kids

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For many children, discrimination inflicts anxiety and misery and interferes with their learning. Schools could be far more welcoming than most now are, and I and other developmental psychologists have an idea of how to help them get there.

After decades of investigating children’s moral de­­vel­op­ment, my colleagues and I have come to understand the reasoning children use to deal with the dissonance between their desire to be fair and their need to belong to friend groups. And we’ve figured out how to help them think through and share their views, particularly about what makes social exclusion unfair and why it’s necessary to stand up against stereotypes and biases.
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Such training and discussions not only help to reduce children’s prejudices but also burnish their ability to resolve conflicts and make school less stressful. Most important, they have the potential to make future societies more just and caring. As kids grow into adults, their ideas of “us versus them” too often harden into prejudices—and that has consequences. If George believes as an elementary school student that boys are better than girls at science, it could influence whom he invites to join the science club in middle school, as well as what he thinks as an adult about whether women can be good doctors, scientists or pilots. Our program shows kids how to challenge such stereotypes with the hope of making society better for everyone.
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But how do prejudices emerge in the first place? After moving to the University of Maryland in 1994 as a professor of human development, I teamed up with Charles Stangor, a member of the school’s psychology department, to study how groups of kids acted when race and gender came into play. Children didn’t always apply their ideas of fairness, we found, when they conflicted with the kids’ group identity. For example, they thought it was wrong to exclude a boy from a ballet club but also said the other kids “would think that John is strange if he takes ballet.” Kids rarely referred to stereotypes when responding to situations of exclusion involving race, however. Clearly, we had to investigate gender- and race-based exclusion differently.