Children's social reasoning about inclusion and exclusion in gender and race peer group contexts

This study investigated whether children's and adolescents' judgments about exclusion of peers from peer group activities on the basis of their gender and race would differ by both age level and the context in which the exclu sion occurred. Individual interviews about exclusion in several different c ontexts were conducted with 130 middle-class, European American children an d adolescents. Younger children were expected to reject exclusion, by using judgments based on moral reasoning, regardless of the potential cost to gr oup functioning, whereas older children were expected to condone exclusion on the basis of group membership in cases in which the inclusion of these c hildren might interrupt effective group functioning On measures of judgment s, justifications for those judgments, and ratings of the appropriateness o f exclusion, the vast majority of children used moral reasoning and rejecte d exclusion in contexts in which only the presence of a stereotype justifie d it. As expected, however, older children (13 years) were more likely to a llow exclusion than younger children (7 and 10 years) when group functionin g was threatened, and they justified this exclusion by using appeals to eff ective group functioning.