Young children's evaluations of exclusion in gender-stereotypic peer contexts

This study investigated how 50 preschool children (25 girls, 25 boys) evalu ated the appropriateness of excluding boys and girls from two types of acti vities (doll play, truck play) and two types of future roles (playing a tea cher, playing a firefighter) across different exclusion contexts. Children judged straight-forward exclusion from activities on the basis of gender as wrong, even if the child's gender was sterrotvpical of the activity. Furth ermore. they justified these decisions on the basis of moral reasons, such as equality and unfairness. Children used a mixture of moral and social con ventional reasoning (including stersotypes), however, to evaluate multiface ted situations that called for judgments about both inclusion and exclusion and that included information about the children's past experience with th e activity.