Preface前言
Exclusion and inclusion are pervasive in children’s lives and continue throughout adulthood. Understanding why exclusion happens, how children think about it, and what it means for social development involves an analysis of individuals, groups, and relationships. Writing this book from our various perspectives, which included social cognition, moral development, social identity, and intergroup attitudes, we took a new view on exclusion and inclusion in children’s lives, one that enabled us to reflect on its fundamental role in social development. We have described how it is that through experiencing exclusion and inclusion, children develop morality (when to include, when not to exclude, and why) and form social identity (what groups do I belong to, what group norms do I care about?).
As a result of these developmental processes, children become capable of challenging or reinforcing prejudicial attitudes and stereotypic beliefs (sometimes explicitly and often implicitly). This is because children who develop social identity without invoking moral judgments appear to justify exclusion in contexts that reflect prejudice, discrimination, and bias. Yet children who develop an understanding of group dynamics and balance these concerns with fairness and equality are well positioned to reject or challenge stereotypic expectations and prejudicial beliefs. The factors and sources of experience that contribute to these diverse trajectories and perspectives reflect the core of this book. The tension between morality and social identity is complex, which makes it an intriguing and compelling topic to write about.
We emerged from this project with a strong sense that much is at stake in understanding children’s perspectives about exclusion and inclusion because of the different consequences to social exclusion and inclusion. Issues as important as social justice and fairness are invoked.Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination are unfortunate outcomes of exclusion decisions that are made without a balance of all of the factors that are implicated. Thus, exclusion takes many forms throughout social life and its meaning is vast and varied.
We began this book as an integrative collaboration, crossing the boundaries of developmental and social psychology to understand exclusion in the child. Over the past 10 years, researchers in the fields of developmental, social, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology have investigated ingroup bias and outgroup threat in their research designs and empirical projects; at the same time, researchers from many different subfields of social science have delved into morality and moral judgment in the child. The convergence of interest on these topics from such diverse areas is astounding and engaging. We found that the areas of intergroup attitudes and morality were often dichotomized, however, and not well integrated. Even closer to our own areas of study, we have found that developmental research has not traditionally examined morality in the context of intergroup relations, and social psychology research on social identity has not typically studied moral reasoning. Thus, one aim of this book was to take an integrative approach for describing how intergroup attitudes, morality, and social identity emerge in the child and create the conditions for exclusion and inclusion.
We would like to thank our respective colleagues and graduate students for discussions and collaborations on the topics in this book. Melanie Killen thanks her colleagues Dominic Abrams, William Arsenio, Natasha Cabrera, Robert Coplan, David Crystal, Ileana Enesco, Nathan Fox, Silvia Guerrero, Dan Hart, Charles Helwig, Stacey Horn, Peter Kahn, Sheri Levy, Tina Malti, Clark McKown, Drew Nesdale, Larry Nucci, Ken Rubin, Martin Ruck, Judi Smetana, Charles Stangor, Elliot Turiel, Cecilia Wainryb, Allan Wigfield, and Amanda Woodward for many collaborations and conversations about social cognition, social development, morality, and exclusion, as well as for many research collaborations that served as the basis for most of her research. In addition, she is grateful to William Damon and Elliot Turiel for inspiring her to study the development of morality, and for providing an intellectually engaging community in graduate school, one that has endured for several decades post-graduate, to Jonas Langer for his encouragement, to Judi Smetana for her mentorship, and to Larry Nucci for his guidance. Melanie Killen also thanks her former doctoral students for their many contributions to the research program on social and moral development, for pushing the research agenda into new and original research directions, and for becoming collaborators on many of xiv Prefacethe research projects described in this book, Alicia Ardila-Rey, Alaina Brenick, Christina Edmonds, Stacey Horn, Jennie Lee-Kim, Nancy Geyelin Margie, Heidi McGlothlin, Yoonjung Park, Christine Theimer Schuette, and Stefanie Sinno, and her current doctoral students Shelby Cooley, Alexandra Henning, Aline Hitti, Megan Clark Kelly, Kelly Lynn Mulvey, and Cameron Richardson, as well as Alexander O’Connor (at UC Berkeley), for their current participation in ongoing research avenues as well as for their lively discussions, feedback, and contributions on all phases of the research program. Thanks are extended to Joan Karr Tycko, who created the illustrations for the social exclusion studies described in chapter 6, and who provided helpful assistance on the development of the stimulus materials.
Adam Rutland thanks his colleagues Dominic Abrams, Rupert Brown, Lindsey Cameron, Marco Cinnirella, Jennifer Ferrell, Rosa Hossain, Sheri Levy, Peter McGeorge, Alan Milne, Drew Nesdale, Dennis Nigbur, Peter Noack, Joe Pelletier, and Charles Watters for numerous collaborations and lively discussions about social development, prejudice, social identity, group processes, intergroup attitudes, and social exclusion in childhood. Adam Rutland also thanks his former graduate students for all their help in creating an intellectually stimulating environment and furthering his knowledge of intergroup attitudes, social identity, biculturalism, cross-ethnic friendships among children and adolescents, Alison Benbow, Allard Feddes, Sarah FitzRoy, Philipp Jugert, and Caroline Kamu, and his current graduate students Samantha Lee and Claire Powell (also working with Dominic Abrams) for their contribution to our ongoing research program. In addition, we received helpful comments and substantive feedback on the manuscript from Dominic Abrams, Aline Hitti, Stacey Horn, Kelly Lynn Mulvey, Drew Nesdale, Larry Nucci, Yoonjung Park, Stefanie Sinno, Judith Smetana, and Elliot Turiel.
The research described in this book was supported by many external sources, including the National Science Foundation (Developmental and Learning Sciences) and the National Institutes of Health (NICHD) in the United States, to Melanie Killen, and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), British Academy, Nuffield Foundation, and British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in the United Kingdom, to Adam Rutland. We are very grateful for the support from these funding agencies. The research described in this book was also supported by internal grants from our respective universities for which we are appreciative, the University of Maryland, College Park, US, and the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. We extend our gratitude to Kelly Lynn Preface xvMulvey for assisting us with organizational and technical details. We thank Andrew McLeer, Christine Cardone, Constance Adler, and Matt Bennett at Wiley-Blackwell publishers for their editorial and technical advice. Finally, we extend our deep appreciation to Judy Dunn for her support and encouragement throughout the project and for her wisdom and inspiration about the importance of children’s lives.
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