UC San Diego

Prejudices develop early in childhood and can drive disparities in how children treat members of different social groups. These biases can progress into xenophobic and discriminatory acts in adulthood, making it crucial to address them early in life. To effectively do so, we must first identify to what extent prejudices are inevitable or driven by cultural factors. This dissertation investigates the role of culture in children’s development of group biases and other moral processes.

In Chapter 1, I find that assigning children to artificially constructed minimal groups (e.g., an Orange or Green group) is sufficient to induce an ingroup bias in children’s sharing behavior, and this bias overrides the desire to appear fair and generous to others. These findings suggest that children are predisposed to favor their ingroup over outgroups, but the implications for real-world groups are unclear. In Chapter 2, I address the limitations of Chapter 1 by examining how Iranian children perceive real-world outgroups that differ from their own in similarity, sociopolitical relations, and status. I find that children do not view all outgroups interchangeably, but rather base their group preferences on the relative status of the group in question. These findings highlight the need for more research in non-Western societies to further understand the complexities of children’s intergroup attitudes. Finally, in Chapter 3, I highlight the issues that arise when researchers use a standard set of measures developed primarily for Western groups to conduct cross-cultural comparisons. I propose a new two-stage model that combines standardized methods with culturally tailored items to achieve greater validity of measures and reliability of findings across different cultural groups. I demonstrate that this two-stage model is effective in capturing the moral/conventional distinction in children from Canada, India, Iran, and Korea.

This dissertation provides key insights into the cognitive and cultural mechanisms that shape childhood prejudice and highlights new approaches for assessing the role of culture in children’s moral reasoning.