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Article Developmental Psychology 2008 Learning (Not) to Talk About Race: When Older Children Underperform in Social Categorization |
The present research identifies an anomaly in sociocognitive development, whereby younger children (8 and 9 years) outperform their older counterparts (10 and 11 years) in a basic categorization task in which the acknowledgment of racial difference facilitates performance. Though older children exhibit superior performance on a race-neutral version of the task, their tendency to avoid acknowledging race hinders objective success when race is a relevant category. That these findings emerge in late childhood, in a pattern counter to the normal developmental trajectory of increased cognitive expertise in categorization, suggests that this anomaly indicates the onset of a critical transition in human social development.
Keywords: Transition; Age; Race; Society; Cognition and Thinking;
Apfelbaum, Evan P., Kristin Pauker, Nalini Ambady, Samuel R. Sommers, and Michael I. Norton. "Learning (Not) to Talk About Race: When Older Children Underperform in Social Categorization." Developmental Psychology 44, no. 5 (2008).
