Understanding Racial Attitudes through the Stimulus Equivalence Paradigm

Abstract

The present study investigated racial attitudes among children by means of the equivalence class paradigm. Four children that, during a pre-test with a matching-to- sample task associated negative symbols with the faces of black men, participated in the study. During training, the children learned to associate positive symbols with an abstract symbol and then the abstract symbol with pictures of black men. At issue was whether, at the end of training, the positive symbols would be associated with the pictures of black men, reversing the behavioral relations revealed during the pre-test. Results from a post-test showed that only one child reversed the pre-test relations. For the other three children, the pre-test relations persisted during the post-test. These results may express the difficulty of changing the behavioral functions of socially loaded stimuli.