There is a substantial literature documenting pre-schoolers' racial awareness and affect from multiracial societies in North America and a fast-growing body of work from societies that are or were once more racially homogeneous. However, studies in Britain, a racially diverse society, on this developmental period have been curiously rare. This study examined racial awareness and affect of 125 White, Black, and Asian 3--to 5-year-olds in London. Children were tested on cognitive level, person description and classification, race labelling and matching, self-categorization and asked about their racial preference and rejection and inferences about their mothers' preference and rejection. Children were least likely to use race versus other categorical cues to spontaneously describe or classify others, even though the majority correctly sorted others by race labels, matched them to drawings, and categorized themselves by race. With age and increasing cognitive level, children described and categorized others by race more and improved in race matching. White children from age 4 preferred White peers and inferred that their mothers would prefer White children at age 5. Children's own preference and inference about mothers are related. Children did not show race-based rejection, but boys inferred that their mothers would prefer White children and reject Black children. The findings are discussed in relation to racial salience between contexts, previous research, and theories.

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The authors studied the developmental stages of children's understanding of upward socioeconomic mobility. They interviewed one hundred 6- to 14-year-old participants from Mexico and Spain and asked them about sources of wealth and factors related to socioeconomic mobility. Categorical analyses of the responses showed few age-related changes but noted some cross-national differences. A different analysis designed to identify levels of understanding showed a significant association between age and type of explanation of socioeconomic mobility. Overall, cross-national comparisons yielded similarities in children's developmental trends, and only slight differences were found with regard to cultural background. The present results contrast with those of studies conducted from the perspective of the social representation theory.

Objective: This study aimed to explore the prevalence of negative attitudes toward overweight peers among children using different explicit and implicit measures, and to analyze their relationships with some aspects of their body image. Method: A total of 120 children aged 6–11 years were interviewed using a computer program that simulated a game containing several tasks. Specifically, we have applied multiple measures of explicit attitudes toward average-weight/overweight peers, several personal body attitudes questions and a child-oriented version of the Implicit Association Test. Results: Our participants showed important prejudice and stereotypes against overweight children, both at the explicit and implicit levels. However, we found important differences in the intensity of prejudice and its developmental course as a function of the tasks and the type of measurement used to assess it. Conclusions: Children who grow up in Western societies idealize thinness from an early age and denigrate overweight, to which they associate explicitly and implicitly a series of negative traits that have nothing to do with the weight. As they grow older, they seem to reduce their levels of explicit prejudice, but not the intensity of implicit bias. More research is needed to study in depth prejudice and discrimination toward overweight children from a developmental point of view.

When many people say the same thing, the individual is more likely to endorse this information than when just a single person says the same. Yet, the influence of consensus information may be modulated by many personal, contextual and cultural variables. Here, we study the sensitivity of Chinese (N = 68) and Spanish (N = 82) preschoolers to consensus in social decision making contexts. Children faced two different types of peer-interaction events, which involved (1) uncertain or ambiguous scenarios open to interpretation (social interpretation context), and (2) explicit scenarios depicting the exclusion of a peer (moral judgment context). Children first observed a video in which a group of teachers offered their opinion about the events, and then they were asked to evaluate the information provided. Participants were assigned to two conditions that differed in the type of consensus: Unanimous majority (non-dissenter condition) and non-unanimous majority (dissenter condition). In the dissenter condition, we presented the conflicting opinions of three teachers vs. one teacher. In the non-dissenter condition, we presented the unanimous opinion of three teachers. The general results indicated that children’s sensitivity to consensus varies depending both on the degree of ambiguity of the social events and the presence or not of a dissenter: (1) Children were much more likely to endorse the majority view when they were uncertain (social interpretation context), than when they already had a clear interpretation of the situation (moral judgment context); (2) The presence of a dissenter resulted in a significant decrease in children’s confidence in majority. Interestingly, in the moral judgment context, Chinese and Spanish children differed in their willingness to defy a majority whose opinion run against their own. While Spanish children maintained their own criteria regardless of the type of condition, Chinese children did so when an “allied” dissenter was present (dissenter condition) but not when confronting a unanimous majority (non-dissenter condition). Tentatively, we suggest that this difference might be related to culture-specific patterns regarding children’s deference toward adults.