Race Salience and Essentialist Thinking in Racial Stereotype Development

Abstract

The authors explored the emergence and antecedents of racial stereotyping in 89 children ages 3–10 years. Children completed a number of matching and sorting tasks, including a measure designed to assess their knowledge and application of both positive and negative in‐group and out‐group stereotypes. Results indicate that children start to apply stereotypes to the out‐group starting around 6 years of age. Controlling for a number of factors, 2 predictors contributed significantly toward uniquely explaining the use of these stereotypes: race salience (i.e., seeing and organizing by race) and essentialist thinking (i.e., believing that race cannot change). These results provide insight into how and when real‐world interventions aimed at altering the acquisition of racial stereotypes may be implemented.