Katherine Kinzer is a professor of psychology at Cornell University. She writes an article for today’s New York Times, titled “How Kids Learn Prejudice,” explaining why the “Trump Effect,” the well-documented rise in bullying in our schools attributed to the Trump campaign’s public embrace of racism and bigotry, is likely to remain with us after the election is over. Trump’s xenophobic message, both overt and subtle, has already provided a twisted sort of “license” for children to mock and humiliate other children of different races and religions, or just other kids who may look “different.” That message would grow by orders of magnitude if he were to become President:
[W]hat’s at stake in a Trump presidency is not just his policy choices, his approach to diplomacy and his having a finger on the nuclear trigger. Also at stake are the attitudes Mr. Trump’s discourse would transmit to a generation of children.
Children begin at an extremely young age to absorb adult cues about the status and worth—or lack thereof—of certain social groups:
Developmental psychology research has shown that by the time they start kindergarten, children begin to show many of the same implicit racial attitudes that adults in our culture hold. Children have already learned to associate some groups with higher status, or more positive value, than others.
Kinzer says that simply differentiating a group as a category can encourage stereotyping behavior among children in a very short period of time. Since Trump has based his entire campaign on demonizing Latinos and Hispanics, Muslims, and now, denigrating women, it’s fair to assume his followers are bringing home and repeating those attitudes and messages to their kids, who are in turn carrying those same biased attitudes into their schools and social interactions. And through repetition on social media and television their exposure to his bigotry—and the stereotypes that accompany it-- is even more pervasive. These are the kinds of poisonous attitudes that can incubate and harden over a lifetime. As Kinzer notes, negative stereotypes are the most likely to make a lasting impression on children:
It is also important to consider that negative information is particularly compelling to children. For example, my colleagues and I have found that when children learn about people committing antisocial actions, they remember those actions in greater detail than they do with comparable positive actions. Talking about entire groups of people as being threatening or dangerous, as Mr. Trump has done, is precisely the kind of language that children are likely to internalize.
Trump’s impending loss in this election won’t undo the damage that’s already been done to our children. He and his hate-filled followers will still be around, probably blaming the same groups for their loss, and they will be vocal about it. Fortunately, as Kinzer notes, kids and younger people tend to be more resilient and amenable to changing their views, so all is not lost:
Our country has made progress on many issues of social bias, and younger generations tend to be more open-minded and tolerant of different groups than older generations are. Research by the psychologists Melissa Ferguson, Thomas Mann and Jeremy Cone shows that with sufficient countervailing positive information, even initially negative implicit attitudes about people can be unlearned.
Unfortunately, the same probably can’t be said about their parents.