Measuring Racial Prejudice in New Zealand Pre-schoolers and testing an intervention to reduce the same using brief cross-race friendship picture books

This study with 88 children from Dunedin (M-Age = 5.18, SD = 1.32) aimed to measure racial prejudice, particularly that against Asians and Arab Muslims. Each participant was requested to complete two tasks to measure their explicit bias and one task to measure their implicit bias. Together, the results indicated that young children display a greater preference for friendship with own race and rate children from own race more positively than children from other races. Further, when these participants were tested again post-intervention (a month of reading picture books about cross-race friendships) they did not show any change thereby indicating that this prejudice not only develops early but is also fairly rigid. Additionally, children's implicit prejudice displayed a positive relation with parent's racism score indicating that the children may have learnt such attitudes from their parents.