DEVELOMENTAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY - METHODOLOGIES OF CHILDHOOD PREJUDICE - Essay Example

vities of young children within the social setting in which they find themselves impress meanings upon them more profoundly than through their intellectual grasp of their surroundings (2003). Methods used by researchers have been chosen in order to probe the areas in which social conditioning occur, as well as to detect the social representations given different objects and interactions that can be found or are known to occur in different environments. Their experiments have captured empirically the results of this kind of social representation by facilitating children and adults’ precise designation of the gender to which objects are believed to be best associated.

Through this they have demonstrated the different levels at which this type of social conditioning occurs, as well as the prejudices that result and that become evident at different stages of children’s development. Developmental psychologists have theorised that gender assumptions, beliefs, values and prejudices become embedded through the social representations that are available to them in their environment (Sanders, 2003). Ideas about the behaviours and expectations of males and females are learned in ways similar to those in which people learn colour and speech: through interaction with others in the social settings in which they find themselves.

These ideas are learned socially and then internalised, and it is these ideas that compact together to form the gender prejudices that are displayed in children. After this period of internalisation, the attitudes and behaviours displayed by persons become unconsciously imbued with these beliefs and their expression of them causes their inculcation in future generations. The method of research by Lloyd and Duveen (1993) has demonstrated the high likelihood of identities to become formed through socialisation that occurs within a specific group.

This has highlighted the diversity that exists among the identities that children have expressed, but in