| Summary: | This article presents information on racial preference and social comparison processes. A number of studies have demonstrated that children negatively evaluate African Americans and positively evaluate Whites. Social comparison theory offers opposite predictions. Economic progress and social mobility should lead to more frequent comparison with Whites. The result of such comparisons would be greater feelings of inferiority, since Whites still are generally more advantaged. This model predicts, then, that White preference will be greater among African American children today. It also predicts that lower-class African American children will respond more favorably to their own race than middle-class African American children. Social class differences in White children's preferences are not predicted, since the extent to which Whites of different classes engage in social comparison with African Americans is unknown. Intuitively, it seems reasonable to believe that both middle- and lower-class Whites use middle-class Whites as a comparison group.
|
|---|