Group slurs predict degrading caricatures of outgroups in children’s books

Evidence

More recently, Mullen (2004) showed that the use of ethnophaulisms towards ethnic immigrant groups in the US also predicted a more subtle form of exclusion, the portrayal of ethnic immigrants to children. For example, members of ethnic immigrant outgroups that were cognitively represented with less complex (and, to a lesser degree, more negative) ethnophaulisms were less frequently present in children’s literature, described more in terms of physical appearance than in terms of personal traits, and portrayed with smaller heads and with lower verbal complexity. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1270

Categorization

• XREF: Dehumanization via smaller heads and physical-appearance framing connects to research on dehumanization measures and infrahumanization in the vault’s prejudice corpus.