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Children’S Opinions Through Social And Moral Judgement On Racial And Gender Differences.

This research will be looking into the moral, social-conventional and personal reasoning that co-exist in children’s evaluations of inclusion and exclusion, racial prejudice and gender differences. It is noted that the priority given to these forms of judgments varies by the age of the child, the context and the target of exclusion which is discussed in previous studies.
Racial prejudice is a pre-formed personal opinion about individuals on the basis of their race. For example, John thinks that Mary will have bad attribute X solely because Mary is a member of race Y.
According to Kohlberg’s (1984) foundational stage model of moral development which had followed Piaget’s research on moral judgement, Children justify acts as right or wrong on the first basis of consequences to the self which is known as the pre-conventional stage. In terms of group norms (the conventional stage) and the post-conventional stage, this means a justice perspective in which individual principles of how to treat one another are understood. In a study conducted by Clark, Hocevar & Dembo (1980) It is discussed that children’s understanding of the origins of race followed a developmental hierarchy and correlated significantly with performance on previously researched measures of physical conservation, physical casualty and social identity.
In recent research, the possibility that skin colour preference is influenced by social desirability among children has been discussed. In Clark et al. (1980) study, current explanations of pro-white prejudice among young children have included child-rearing practices, personality organisation, a generalised fear of the dark, an amount of interracial contact and also the teaching of prejudice in a larger society through reinforcement and modeling. The theoretical researches discussed in Clark et al. (1980) explain that perceptual and cognitive processes are both significant in the acquisition of attitudes. The focus of this study was to investigate the...