Date of Award
Spring 6-13-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in Psychology
Organizational Unit
College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology
First Advisor
E. Paige Lloyd
Second Advisor
Rashida Banerjee
Third Advisor
Heidi Vuletich
Fourth Advisor
Max Weisbuch
Copyright Statement / License for Reuse
All Rights Reserved.
Keywords
Adultification, Age perception, Intergroup relations, Person perception, Race, Social psychology
Abstract
Racialized adultification is a pervasive bias in which individuals tend to judge Black children as older and more adult-like than White children of the same age. This racial bias is discussed across many scientific domains in addition to popular media, yet there is relatively little empirical work documenting its existence, consequences, and boundary conditions. In the current work, I aim to develop an empirical foundation that advances scientific understanding of racialized adultification and in turn contributes to a growing model that elucidates the conditions under which individuals are disproportionately likely to express this pernicious bias. In the current work, I focus primarily on examining key perceiver characteristics and contextual factors that I theorized may amplify racialized adultification bias. Specifically, I examine whether perceiver race, social dominance orientation, or system justification may moderate the expression of racialized adultification bias (Experiment 1). Next, I examine whether racialized adultification processes may be amplified when threats to current racial hierarchies are salient (Experiment 2). Finally, I investigate whether racialized adultification is enhanced when the context of such judgments can create or maintain racial hierarchies in crime-related (Experiment 3) and healthcare-related (Experiment 4) domains. Across experiments, I found robust patterns of racialized adultification in which perceivers judged Black children as older and more adult-like than White children. Further, I found that perceiver characteristics and context-relevance can alter the expression of this bias, but that more work is needed to understand potential source(s) and motivation(s) underlying this bias.
Copyright Date
6-2025
Publication Statement
Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.
Rights Holder
Kevin M. Summers
Provenance
Received from ProQuest
File Format
application/pdf
Language
English (eng)
Extent
131 pgs
File Size
4.6 MB
Recommended Citation
Summers, Kevin M., "Who Gets To Be a Child and When? The Pervasive yet Contextually Shaped Nature of Racialized Adultification across Perceivers and Contexts" (2025). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2613.
https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/2613
Included in
African American Studies Commons, Child Psychology Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Social Psychology Commons, Social Psychology and Interaction Commons