Evidence of racial stereotyping in white portuguese children's judgments: The shifting standards model tested with children

• Autor(a) principal: Mégevand, Laura Boavida
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/11979
• topic: Social perception & cognition; Psicologia do desenvolvimento -- Developmental psychology; Stereotypes; Shifting standards; Children; Perceção social -- Social perception; Estereótipo racial; Criança -- Child

The shifting standards model (Biernat, Manis & Nelson, 1991) suggests that although frequently members of stereotyped groups are judged as having the characteristics attributed to their group, sometimes they can be judged in comparison to standards specific to their group, thus contrasting from the group stereotype. Objective scales may reveal assimilation effects because they have the same criterion of evaluation for everybody, whereas subjective scales may show contrast or null effects, because they allow the use of different standards of comparison for people from different groups, based on group stereotypes. We examined this model among a novel group: children. As early as 6, children start developing racial stereotypes and may use them to form judgments. We tested the influence of objective versus subjective response scales on white Portuguese first and fourth graders’ evaluations of Blacks versus Whites on mathematics ability and basketball performance. No significant results were found in the domain of basketball ability. We found a suggestion of the shifting standards effect with first graders. Unexpectedly, fourth graders’ rated Blacks higher objectively than Whites on mathematics ability. For fourth graders, both blacks and whites were rated differently depending on whether the scale was subjective or objective. This raises questions about how to interpret data on stereotyping in children.