Developmental Patterns in the Flexibility of Children's Ethnic Attitudes

Abstract

Developmental patterns in ethnic attitudes were assessed in 232 children aged 5 to 12 years in relation to cognitive development and social desirability responding. English-speaking children assigned 10 positive attributes, 10 negative attributes, and 4 neutral attributes to either an English-speaking child, a French-speaking child, or both an English- and a French-speaking child, depicted by line drawings. Positive attributions to their own ethnic group and negative attributions to the other ethnic group were less frequent in older children. Flexibility of ethnic attitudes, that is, attributions to both groups, increased with age and were inversely related to positive own-group attributions and negative other-group attributions. High flexibility followed the attainment of concrete operational thinking, as measured by conservation but not by ethnic constancy. Flexibility was inversely related to Crandall social desirability responding and unrelated to children's conformity to the experimenter's attitude. These results indicate the importance of cognitive rather than social desirability factors in the development of children's ethnic attitudes.