Five-year-olds’ group-centered cognition and negativity bias explain prejudice acquisition timing.

Evidence

Given that evaluative forms of prejudice seem to be prevalent and strong at 5 years, we might ask: Why do children learn a label–evaluation pairing at 5 years and not at 4 or 3 years? Why do they not equally well learn the positive associations? Cognitive processes may be partly able to account for age and association differences. Children of 5 years are less selfand more group-centered than 4- or 3-year-olds and more motivated to use good–bad dichotomies. Likewise, negative evaluations are taken to be more informative and therefore given more weight, perhaps because negative behaviors are unexpected and less frequent. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1993

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The negativity-as-more-informative asymmetry echoes the broader negativity bias literature and connects to the adult implicit/explicit prejudice work.
• QUESTION: The claim that 5-year-olds are ‘more motivated to use good-bad dichotomies’ than younger children deserves deeper scrutiny - is this moral development stage or social pressure?

Related

• Five-year-olds favor negative over positive group associations as informative. (similarity 0.93)
• Children’s apprenticeship-of-observation transmits teacher bias along with pedagogy (similarity 0.79)
• Children infer prejudice from observed social regularities even without overt parental bias (similarity 0.79)
• Behavior-evaluation gaps in prejudice may reflect age-related cognitive control shifts (similarity 0.78)