Five-year-olds favor negative over positive group associations as informative.

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