Focus: Understanding the Roots of Tolerance and Prejudice

Issues: Children & Youth; Education; Tolerance

Region: North America

A Research Consortium at Harvard University Designed to investigate these critical questions:

• How do we develop the capacity to care for and respect others whom we perceive as different from ourselves with respect to national, gender, racial, ethnic, and other identities?

• What effects do early social experiences of tolerant or prejudicial environments have on the later wellness or illness of children, especially those growing up under adverse social conditions?

A group of five Harvard faculty members from different disciplines: social psychology, human rights law, child psychiatry, educational anthropology, and developmental psychology has formed a Research Consortium. The aim of the Research Consortium is to strengthen our understanding of several common themes. One common theme is the linkages between cultural forms of tolerance and prejudice experienced by children and youth, and the forms of positive or negative orientations to others they develop later in life.

An initial goal of the Research Consortium is to develop a range of assessment methods that can be used in future longitudinal studies to study these questions. A second goal is to determine the applicability of usable knowledge from these projects to assess programs that promote mental health and prevent mental illness in children and youth. For example, Mahzarin Banaji is studying implicit bias in young children and Robert Selman is developing methods to assess children's conscious reflective awareness of prejudice and tolerance. How can these methods be used together to assess in a comprehensive way interventions designed to reduce negative bias and promote social understanding?

Prejudice and intolerance, like viruses and bacteria, can be the source of illness and ill health in children, but little is known about how this works. As Felton Earls points out in his project, living under conditions of stigma, hatred, and intolerance is at best traumatic; more often it leads to a chronic lack of wellness expressed as anger and bitterness, diagnosable disorder, or both. What are the effects of negative bias toward others on the self as well as others, in individuals and in groups? Living under conditions of tolerance, conversely, should have the opposite effect, but how can we demonstrate this?

As Mica Pollock suggests, activism may be one of the best forms of prevention against hopelessness and despair that lead to depression. Jacqueline Bhabha is studying an especially vulnerable group: forcibly migrated children fleeing war or persecution and traveling alone in search of safety. She asks, are these children, burdened by the double jeopardy of alienate and minority status, also legally discriminated against when they seek asylum? If so, what are the effects?

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Understanding the Roots of Tolerance and Prejudice