Children and Social Exclusion Morality, Prejudice, and Group Identity

by Killen, Melanie; Rutland, Adam

• ISBN13: 9781405176514
• ISBN10: 1405176512
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-05-06
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Children and Social Exclusion: Morality, Prejudice, and Group Identity explores the origins of prejudice and the emergence of morality to explain why children include some and exclude others. Formulates an original theory about childrenrs"s experiences with exclusion and how they understand the world of discrimination based on group membership Brings together Social Domain Theory and Social Identity Theory to explain how children view exclusion that often results in prejudice, and inclusion that reflects social justice and morality Presents new research data consisting of in-depth interviews from childhood to late adolescence, observational findings with peer groups, and experimental paradigms that test how children understand group dynamics and social norms, and show either group bias or morality Illustrates data with direct quotes from children along with diagrams depicting their social understanding Presents new insights about the origins of prejudice and group bias, as well as morality and fairness, drawn from extensive original data

Author Biography

Melanie Killen is Professor of Human Development, Professor of Psychology (Affiliate), and Associate Director for the Center for Children, Relationships, and Culture at the University of Maryland. She is a Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. She is also a recipient of the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award by the Provost from the University of Maryland. Her book with Dan Hart, Morality in Everyday Life: Developmental Perspectives (1995), received the outstanding book award from AERA, and her book with Sheri Levy, Intergroup Attitudes and Relations from Childhood to Adulthood, received an Honorable Mention for the Otto Klineberg Memorial Prize from SPSSI. Her research examines the development of morality, intergroup attitudes, exclusion and inclusion, peer relationships, prejudice, culture, and how social experience is related to social-cognitive development.

Adam Rutland is Professor of Developmental Psychology at the Child Development Unit and Centre for the Study of Group Processes in the School of Psychology at the University of Kent. Previously he has been a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Surrey and been a member of Faculty at the University of Aberdeen. His research examines the development of children's prejudice and social identities. He has conducted recent research into when and how children learn to self-present their explicit attitudes; how intergroup contact can reduce children's prejudice; children's exclusion of peers within groups and acculturation amongst ethnic minority children.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction.This chapter will introduce the book by discussing the phenomenon of exclusion in children's lives, pointing to the range of contexts in which exclusion occurs, the short-term and long-term consequences of exclusion, and the types of factors that are related to children's decisions to exclude others. Children weigh different considerations throughout development which directly bear on their viewpoints about exclusion. These concerns include their conceptions of how groups work, qualifications for group inclusion, social identity, and self esteem. To the extent that children begin with negative biases, children also have a social predisposition, and an early form of morality and fairness. A general overview of how children deal with negative and positive orientations to include and exclude in early development, and throughout childhood will be described..Chapter 2: Exclusion, morality, and stereotypes.This chapter will describe developmental and social psychology theories about inclusion and exclusion in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. In addition, research on children's moral concepts, such as fairness and justice, along with their stereotypes and biases based on group membership, will be described as it relates to issues of exclusion. In addition, research on social identity and social categorization will be described as it is informative about how children conceptualize groups and differentiate between the ingroup and the outgroup..Chapter 3: Consequences of exclusion.This chapter will describe the short term and long term negative consequences of exclusion, and experiences of exclusion, which differ for boys and girls, and for individuals from different majority and minority groups in cultures..Chapter 4: Social experience in schools.Much research has documented the ways in which children's social experience can be positively or negatively related to their judgments about exclusion. Thus, children who experience positive forms of diversity in schools are more aware of the negative consequences of exclusion in contrast to children who are in schools that lack diversity. How school diversity is measured and studied will be discussed..Chapter 5: Explicit judgments about exclusion.This chapter will discuss research on explicit judgments about exclusion, including general descriptions of inclusion and exclusion based on research on gender, race/ethnicity, and culture. Further, how children differentiate between straightforward exclusion and multifaceted contexts will be discussed, along with age-related changes, and changes as a function of ethnicity and culture of the participant..Chapter 6: Implicit bias and indirect measures of exclusion judgments.In this chapter, research on children's implicit bias, and bias measured with indirect assessments, such as ambiguous pictures will be described. This work will be discussed in relation to social psychology adult implicit bias research, and how different forms of implicit attitudes are measured in childhood..Chapter 7: Gender, race/ethnicity, culture, religion: Categories for exclusion.This chapter will discuss similarities and differences regarding how different categories of exclusion are evaluated and understood by children..Chapter 8: Contact with others from different backgrounds: Intergroup contact and forms of intervention.In this chapter, research on intergroup contact will be discussed and related to children's social experience in schools. Included in this chapter and other chapters will be work from multiple cultural contexts. Further intervention research that has documented the ways in which facilitating inclusion are successful will be described..Chapter 9: Majority and minority perspectives.This chapt