VERY interesting read that evidences hatred IS taught, albeit sometimes unconsciously ~ emphasis/bolding below is mine ~ there are "live links" to more/corroborating info in the original ~ Sooz

Friday, Jan 31, 2014 06:45 AM CST
Kids are learning intolerance at a surprisingly young age
Researchers are learning how young kids begin to show signs of disdain for those not in their own group.
Tom Jacobs, Pacific Standard

At what point in our young lives do we start thinking of people who are different from us as enemies?

Provocative new research from Germany suggests this problematic psychological process—which underpins racism, extreme nationalism, and prejudice of all sorts—kicks in somewhere around age seven.

Love for one’s own group and hatred for perceived outsiders are separate attitudes that emerge at different stages of a child’s development, according to University of Erfurt researchers David Buttelmann and Robert Böhm.

In the journal Psychological Science, they present evidence that six-year-olds show clear bias in favor of a group they belong to. However, hatred for opposing groups doesn’t show up until two years later.

They further found that eight-year-old boys feel, or at least act upon, this disdain far more strongly than eight-year-old girls.

Buttelmann and Böhm offer evidence from a cleverly designed experiment, which featured a computer game of their own devising.

Children—45 six-year-olds and 36 eight-year-olds—gathered in a laboratory in groups of three to 10. Each drew a lottery ticket that determined whether they would belong to the “green” or “yellow” group. Members of each group were assigned to opposite corners of the lab, and wore T-shirts of their group’s color.

After a short introduction, each youngster sat down at a computer terminal and played a game in which they were presented with 15 “positive resources” (including a cookie and a teddy bear) and 15 “negative resources” (including a spider and a piece of broken glass). They were given the option of allocating each item to a puppet dressed as a member of their group, or to one dressed as a member of the other group.

Importantly, they also had a third option: Depositing the item into an open box. In this way, they could pass up unwanted items without engaging in the hostile act of giving them to a representative of the opposing group.

Among the “positive resources,” the six-year-olds allocated 75 percent to their own group’s representative, 10 percent to the outsider puppet, and 15 percent to the box. The eight-year-olds showed an even greater bias toward their own group, giving 90 percent of these valuable items to their own puppet, four percent to the other, and six percent to the box.

Among the unwanted items, the six-year-olds allocated 51 percent to the other group’s puppet, 12 percent to their own group’s puppet, and 37 percent to the box. These percentages shifted significantly for the eight-year-olds: They allocated 71 percent to the other group’s puppet, four percent to their own group’s puppet, and 25 percent to the box.

Further analysis revealed that “out-group hate was the dominant motivation for the eight-year-olds’ distributions of negative resources,” the researchers write.

While there were no significant gender differences among the six-year-olds, the eight-year-old boys showed far more disdain for the other group than the eight-year-old girls. They assigned 84 percent of the unwanted items to the outsider puppet; the girls allocated only 60 percent, and put far more of the items into the neutral box.

“Overall, the results indicated that in-group love is already present in children of preschool age, and can motivate in-group-biased behavior,” the researchers conclude, “whereas out-group hate develops only after a child’s sixth birthday.”

In the musical “South Pacific,” Oscar Hammerstein famously traced the origins of prejudice, declaring: “You’ve got to be carefully taught, before you are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate.”

He clearly got the time frame right. Unfortunately, the form of instruction he describes seems to occur spontaneously, and the child absorbs it easily.

That said, these results may not be as depressing as they seem. Buttelmann and Böhm note that, if in-group love develops before out-group hate, parents and educators can teach tolerance by “building on humans’ inherent prosocial nature.”

“Children, and in particular boys, should be taught as early as preschool age that intragroup cooperation and loyalty are valuable and beneficial for humanity,” they write, “only if they do not imply out-group derogation at the same time.”

In other words, there’s a school-age window of a year or two before disdain for outsiders kicks in—a time when kids are presumably receptive to a message of co-existence and cooperation. For all our sakes, we had better take advantage of it.

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/31/prejudice_is_learned_before_children_turn_8_parnter/

I don't see where "hatred" comes into this study. I do see where tribal mentality is evident, which may be a throwback to prehistoric man. People have always grouped together with those like them (whether real or imposed as in the study) and have a tendency to, as a group, have little regard for other groups. Call it a feeling of superiority. "We" are better than "you". I think it was once a way to protect one's own group and ensure the continuation of a particular blood-line. Very basic stuff.

IOW, I think it's inherent but can be exacerbated by parents and/or peers to the point it becomes dangerous and creates conflict. Civil wars are a good example.

I was taught to disdain and even fear blacks. As I matured, I saw the flaw in that and changed my way of thinking. There is hope that as children mature they will lose their bigotry, as they get to know people of other "groups"/ethnicity/religion/sexual persuasion.

roseanne, while I agree with most of the substance of your post, I see a VERY short distance between bigotry and hatred ~ the stronger the bigotry, the stronger the hatred ~ altho I do admit that some of it seems to be more latent ~

Sooz

Well, I think this study is hopeful in a way. It's in-group and out-group focused, so if you are in a mixed raced classroom your in-group can be mixed race. A child as old as six can consider himself as part of the world community.

That stated, I love all things Eagles and hate all things Cowboys. I think this is natural and even noble. LOL!!!

It's just that I think the word hate is a little strong. My family never hated blacks really. It was more of a disdain, as I said. Derision, with a feeling of superiority, touched with an underlying fear. What caused the fear, I don't know but I could "feel" it when family discussions turned to race relations. Maybe a fear that blacks would take over or something? Or even more basic, a fear that the civil rights movement would become an all-out civil war. Who knows?

I know that some people who are very bigoted do hate, but they are few and far between. Those that hate are usually the type that hate in general......themselves, the government, their circumstances etc. IMO, they are unbalanced to begin with.....and get all the press coverage.

I posted this here because I consider it a companion piece to this OP and may explain a little more what happens with people. We all remember the "prison" experiment.

Could you snatch away a child's lunch?
By Jason Marsh
updated 12:45 PM EST, Sat February 1, 2014

(CNN) -- Two recent incidents have people questioning the basic goodness of humanity.

In Washington, a man had a fatal heart attack across the street from a fire station. Passers-by said firefighters refused to help him because they hadn't been officially dispatched.

At an elementary school in Salt Lake City, staff members seized and discarded children's lunches because their parents owed money on their accounts. (School administrators apologized.)

Officials in Washington say they are "furious" at the firefighters' inaction. A mother of one of the students in Utah says she was "blind-sided" by the school's actions, and a state senator says he is "incredibly disappointed."

The anger and bewilderment are understandable. But neither incident seems that shocking when considered in light of decades of study of the psychology of obedience and power. Researchers have repeatedly found that allegiance to rules and protocols routinely trumps people's consciences and sense of basic moral responsibility.

Most famously, studies by Stanley Milgram at Yale University in the 1960s found that ordinary people were willing to give what they believed were fatal electric shocks to their partners in a bogus "memory experiment" simply because a researcher in a white lab coat told them to. The people supposedly getting shocked (who were working with Milgram and not being hurt at all) hollered and pleaded for the shocks to stop, which distressed many of the people administering them, but they kept at it. In fact, roughly two-thirds of the participants kept giving shocks until they had reached the highest voltage level possible, a percentage far higher than Milgram or any of his colleagues anticipated.

In a similar vein, the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment run by psychologist Philip Zimbardo took typical Stanford University undergrads and randomly assigned them to be guards or prisoners in a makeshift jail. The guards completely took on their new roles and meted out cruel and sadistic treatment to their "prisoners."

The authority they were given and the rules they were asked to enforce blinded them to what was right — and perhaps the same could be said for those school officials and firefighters.

It's important to keep in mind that the participants in Milgram and Zimbardo's studies weren't necessarily bad people. They were likely no worse than you or me. They, too, were likely "blind-sided by the surprisingly strong ways that rules and circumstance can dictate our behavior. While we would like to believe that humanity has evolved since the 1960s, other researchers have achieved similar results in more recent years.

Is the upshot of all this that we're condemned to be unprincipled sheep? That a few rules and regulations can easily blind us to the better angels of our nature?

Not so fast. The research shows that while external influences on our behavior can be strong, they are not insurmountable.

We can overcome these influences simply by becoming more aware of them. One set of studies found that when people attended social psychology lectures explaining how external pressures can inhibit moral behavior, they became less susceptible to those pressures.

Other evidence suggests that being reminded of one's similarities or common humanity with a person in need can motivate us to come to their aid, even when doing so puts ourselves at risk. Perhaps if bystanders' appeals to those firefighters had struck a more personal chord with them, they might have been jarred into action.

Finally, throughout history, we have seen examples of people who displayed great altruism, even heroism, while most everyone around them remained bystanders to evil — or perpetrators of it. Some evidence suggests that the roots of this caring behavior extend back into childhood. A seminal study by Samuel and Pearl Oliner suggests that one commonality of people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust was that their parents nurtured empathy in them, such as by encouraging them to see the world from other points of view and emphasizing the universal similarity of people.

Indeed, the childhood roots of altruism were evoked by another story in the news this week: the story of 10-year-old Danny DiPietro, who noticed that something seemed awry in a neighbor's garage and pressured his mother to investigate.

Despite his mother's resistance, Danny persisted until his mother agreed to walk down the street. She found an 80-year-old neighbor who had slipped, couldn't get up, and likely would have died had she spent much more time trapped outside in the freezing cold. Rather than remaining quiet or succumbing to the pressure not to make waves, Danny stayed attuned to his moral instincts—"something just didn't feel right," he said.

Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that while sensing what's right can get complicated by adult rules and regulations, it can still come naturally to kids.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/01/opinion/m ... Stories%29

roseanne, at our age and our parents' age, a lot of it is primal fear. Depending on where the person lived, they may have not seen many blacks if any. On tv blacks were shown as the savages that Tarzan had to save people from. To this day on a lot of the news we hear a black person did this crime. They don't say a white person did this other crime and many people are too lazy minded to realize if they don't say color or race chances are it was a white person. Many times a black face in pictures or on tv looks far scarier because the lighting is not right and the shadows on darker faces make expressions harder to interpret. Also, simple things like fearing the dark can show up in our relations with darker skinned people. Many of us were taught that blacks were animals and black men wanted to rape white women and girls. We can learn that these things are bs but they will pop into our heads. People should pop them right back out but many don't. If you see a black and your mind goes to the African tribes and Tarzan and you don't throw that off you feel a primal fear. The gangs and stuff make it easier to still think of the savages. I agree this isn't really hatred, just ignorance. My family has the hatred. Most don't. They have the ignorance and the laziness and lack of desire to make an effort.