Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7/7 (2013): 457–469, 10.1111/spc3.12038 A Social Psychologist’s Guide to the Development of Racial Attitudes Sarah E. Hailey * and Kristina R. Olson Yale University Abstract Over the last several decades, social psychologists have generated a literature rich with information about the racial intergroup attitudes and biases of adults. In parallel, developmental psychologists have documented the emergence and development of these attitudes in children, yet surprisingly little cross-talk occurs between the two fields. Here, we review the developmental literature on racial intergroup attitudes with an eye toward two major themes observed frequently in the social psychology literature: the tendency to favor one’s own group and the tendency to favor higher-status groups. We review empirical findings beginning in infancy, revealing that the earliest signs of racial differentiation are present in the first year of life and continue through the elementary school years, noting that explicit attitudes undergo vast developmental changes whereas implicit attitudes remain remarkably stable throughout the lifespan. We also examine potential ways the developmental literature might inform the social psychology of racial intergroup attitudes. When Gordon Allport published “The Nature of Prejudice” in 1954, he sparked a profusion of interest into how normal psychological processes could give rise to the intergroup attitudes and biases observed in adults. Two key themes have consistently emerged from this literature: humans tend to favor their own ingroup, and they also tend to favor higher-status groups. In parallel to adult work, developmental psychologists have investigated intergroup attitudes in infants and young children, documenting their emergence and how they develop over time. Yet surprisingly, little cross-talk occurs between the adult and developmental literatures (Dunham & Olson, 2008). In this review, we investigate the earliest manifestations of these two tendencies and discuss how understanding their development might facilitate better theories of intergroup cognition. Developmental research offers crucial insights because nearly all intergroup attitudes emerge early in child development, well before social psychologists typically begin investigating them. Although some social psychologists have tried to understand the development of social attitudes by investigating the “development” of attitudes toward novel objects or groups in adults (e.g., Sherman, 1996; Fazio, Eiser, & Shook, 2004; Gregg, Seibt, & Banaji, 2006), it is unclear whether adults use the same mechanisms used by children when actual intergroup attitudes first emerge in ontogeny (Dunham & Olson, 2008). In addition, developmental research provides unique opportunities to adjudicate between different theories about the nature and purpose of intergroup attitudes. For example, the intuitive notion that these attitudes emerge from an extended period of exposure to cultural norms would predict that their strength would increase over the course of development. Only the developmental literature can provide answers to such questions. In this review, we focus on racial attitudes because this is the domain in which most of the intergroup research in both developmental and social psychology has been conducted. Decades of empirical research have suggested that race is a primary category of person- © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd