Department of Social Psychology, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2010 Mar;98(3):356-74. doi: 10.1037/a0017993.
Four cross-sectional studies are presented that investigated the automatic activation of prejudice in children and adolescents (aged 9 years to 15 years). Therefore, 4 different versions of the affective priming task were used, with pictures of ingroup and outgroup members being presented as prejudice-related prime stimuli. In all 4 studies, a pattern occurred that suggests a linear developmental increase of automatic prejudice with significant effects of outgroup negativity appearing only around the ages of 12 to 13 years. Results of younger children, on the contrary, did not indicate any effect of automatic prejudice activation. In contrast, prejudice effects in an Implicit Association Test (IAT) showed high levels of prejudice independent of age (Study 3). Results of Study 4 suggest that these age differences are due to age-related differences in spontaneous categorization processes. Introducing a forced-categorization into the affective priming procedure produced a pattern of results equivalent to that obtained with the IAT. These results suggest that although children are assumed to acquire prejudice at much younger ages, automatization of such attitudes might be related to developmental processes in early adolescence. We discuss possible theoretical implications of these results for a developmental theory of prejudice representation and automatization during childhood and adolescence.
呈现了四项横断面研究，这些研究调查了儿童和青少年（9 岁至 15 岁）中偏见的自动激活。因此，使用了 4 种不同版本的情感启动任务，将内群体和外群体成员的图片作为与偏见相关的启动刺激呈现。在所有 4 项研究中，出现了一种模式，表明自动偏见呈线性发展增加，仅在 12 至 13 岁左右才出现外群体负面效应的显著影响。相反，年龄较小的儿童的结果并未表明自动偏见激活的任何影响。相比之下，内隐联想测验（IAT）中的偏见效应表明，无论年龄大小，偏见水平都很高（研究 3）。研究 4 的结果表明，这些年龄差异归因于自发分类过程的年龄相关差异。在情感启动程序中引入强制分类会产生与 IAT 获得的结果等效的结果模式。这些结果表明，尽管人们认为儿童在更小的年龄就获得了偏见，但这种态度的自动化可能与青春期早期的发展过程有关。我们讨论了这些结果对儿童和青少年时期偏见代表性和自动化的发展理论的可能理论意义。
