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Friendships across racial lines are common among children until around the age of 10. But then something changes. Children begin to self-segregate by race in classrooms and cafeterias, even in diverse and integrated schools. They begin to mirror the racial divides reflected in their communities and society. Researchers have documented this repeatedly, but they’ve struggled to understand why it happens. The long-standing assumption has been that children become more prejudiced at this age. As a result, educators typically focus on making racial attitudes more positive. But growing evidence shows that this decline in friendships is not caused by a spike in prejudice (in fact, explicitly racist views generally decrease at this age). Our new research, in collaboration with Stanford psychology professors Carol Dweck and Jennifer Eberhardt, suggests that this withdrawal from cross-race encounters may have less to do with how prejudiced children are and more to do with what they come to believe is true of a person’s prejudice—that it is permanent. Children understand that “once a racist, always a racist,” which increases their anxieties about interacting across racial lines.
Our research suggests that children withdraw from cross-race engagement because, at around 10 years of age, they come to view prejudice as a despicable trait that does not change. Children at this age begin to recognize the stakes associated with race and cross-race interactions—including the risks of being labeled as, or targeted by, someone prejudiced. And to the extent that children come to believe in the permanence of prejudice, they disengage from the cross-race encounters that could subject them to these risks.
In our first experiment, we measured the extent to which 8-13 year-olds thought of prejudice as a fixed quality, by asking them…
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Source : time
