A White House report earlier this year outlined how discrimination, and specifically racial discrimination, persists in the United States today, raising questions about when attitudes underlying these behaviors are formed.

Past scholarship has found discriminatory views increase as children grow older. However, new work by a team of New York University psychology researchers shows that young children in the US are less likely than adults to see discrimination as harmful, indicating these beliefs begin at an early age. Moreover, children see discriminatory acts—negative actions motivated by the victim’s group membership—as less serious than identical harmful acts motivated by other reasons, unrelated to the victim’s social identities.

“Children frequently encounter discrimination in their daily lives—as witnesses, victims, and, sometimes, as perpetrators,” observes Vivian Liu, the paper’s lead author and an NYU doctoral student at the time of the study, which appears in the journal Cognitive Psychology. “Our research reveals that, unlike adults, children in the US view discriminatory acts as more permissible than identical acts motivated by other reasons. This view of discrimination may lead children to engage in discriminatory behavior themselves, make them less likely to seek help when targeted by discrimination, and reduce their willingness to intervene when witnessing discrimination against others.”

However, the findings offer some reasons for optimism. They showed that by the age of 8, children begin to recognize discrimination as more harmful when it targets certain groups.

“This suggests that children can understand why discrimination is particularly harmful while also underscoring the importance of discussing these issues with children from an early age,” explains Andrei Cimpian, a professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology and the senior author of the paper.

The research consisted of four studies with nearly 600 children (aged 4 to 9) and more than 600 adults in the US. The paper’s authors presented the participants with scenarios involving harmful actions between members of different made-up groups, comparing situations where someone was harmed because of their group membership (discrimination) versus being harmed for other (personal) reasons.

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In one of the studies, for example, adult and child participants saw a member of a group (e.g., an animated circle) harming (e.g., knocking over a tower of blocks) an outgroup member (e.g., an animated square). The participants were told the harm was motivated either by dislike of the victim’s group (a discriminatory act: “… because I don’t like Squares”) or by personal dislike for the victim (“… because I don’t like you”).

Both the perpetrator and the victim were introduced with a proper name (e.g., “Modi,” “Bosa”) so children could keep track of them throughout the story. The proper names were chosen to be uncommon in English so that children would not associate these characters with other people they knew with similar names.

In another study, the researchers varied whether these fictional groups were described in “essentialist” terms ( as biologically based and unchangeable)—to model how children conceive of real-world social categories such as race and gender—or instead in “temporary” terms (e.g., sports teams [“the green team”]).

Overall, the children, compared to adults, saw discriminatory acts as less serious than identical harmful acts motivated by personal reasons. In addition, the studies also found that while adults viewed discrimination against “essentialized” groups—those paralleling gender or race—as more serious than discrimination against temporary groups (like sports teams), children did not make this distinction.

However, in one study the researchers asked participants to consider the “status” of the groups by providing information such as the following: “The Circles always get what they want and the Squares never get what they want” (i.e., “Squares” are the lower-status group) and “Sometimes the Circles get what they want and sometimes the Squares get what they want” (i.e., the groups are of equal status).

In the majority of societies, the most common and concerning acts of discrimination occur against lower-status groups, note Cimpian and Liu, now a postdoctoral fellow at University College Dublin.

Younger children (roughly, before the age of 7 or 8 years) did not differentiate between discrimination against a lower- versus equal-status group. In contrast, children older than 7 or 8 began to recognize discrimination as more harmful when it targeted lower-status groups.

“Understanding how children’s views of discrimination differ from adults’ is essential for developing strategies to help them recognize and resist discriminatory behavior early in development,” Cimpian concludes.

IMAGE CREDIT: Bess Hamiti