Two Signatures of Implicit Intergroup Attitudes: Developmental Invariance and Early Enculturation

Abstract

Long traditions in the social sciences have emphasized the gradual internalization of intergroup attitudes and the putatively more basic tendency to prefer the groups to which one belongs. In four experiments (N = 883) spanning two cultures and two status groups within one of those cultures, we obtained new evidence that implicit intergroup attitudes emerge in young children in a form indistinguishable from adult attitudes. Strikingly, this invariance from childhood to adulthood holds for members of socially dominant majorities, who consistently favor their in-group, as well as for members of a disadvantaged minority, who, from the early moments of race-based categorization, do not show a preference for their in-group. Far from requiring a protracted period of internalization, implicit intergroup attitudes are characterized by early enculturation and developmental invariance.