Children’s prejudice shows as avoidance and exclusion rather than overt hostility

Evidence

Because children lack the emotional and verbal sophistication of adolescents and adults, their prejudice does not usually take the form of anger, hostility, and verbal taunts. Rather, it is experienced as suspicion, fear, sadness, and disapproval, and expressed as avoidance, social exclusion, and negative evaluation. Consequently, qualitative methods that use participant observation and open-ended interviews reveal little obvious prejudice among young children (e.g. Holmes, 1995), though these were the sources of Allport’s anecdotes. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1988

Among children and adolescents, the most overt level includes racial conflicts and name-calling. Less overt but equally damaging is avoidance of outgroup peers. Because children lack the emotional and verbal sophistication of adolescents and adults, their prejudice does not usually take the form of anger, hostility, and verbal taunts. Rather, it is experienced as suspicion, fear, sadness, and disapproval, and expressed as avoidance, social exclusion, and negative evaluation. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 1988

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the shallow-data problem in the Milgrom law-merchant pieces: methods sensitive to the observable layer miss the underlying phenomenon.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1988; John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 1988