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Abstract
Children begin forming social group attitudes in the first years of life. Through what inputs does this learning occur? Adults in young children's lives—especially parents and educators—are widely understood to be powerful socialization agents. Parents' sociopolitical attitudes and racial ideologies are reflected in how they discuss racial diversity and inclusion, and trusted adults in educational settings can communicate expectations and status hierarchies through both explicit language and nonverbal behavior. This dissertation examines two intertwined channels of social transmission: the explicit messages adults endorse and the implicit cues they display, and how these channels relate to children’s emerging ideologies and intergroup attitudes. In Chapter 1, I test how authoritarian values relate to White parents’ diversity ideology (color-evasive vs. color-conscious), their beliefs about who should teach children about racism and diversity, and whether these parental orientations correspond to children’s developing values and ideologies. In Chapter 2, I examine whether the Chapter 1 patterns generalize to families of color, and where associations weaken, shift, or take different forms, clarifying how surface-similar messages may serve distinct functions across racial/ethnic contexts and whether these differences impact intergenerational transmission. In Chapter 3, I turn to experiments on implicit transmission, probing whether children are sensitive to adults' subtle attentional cues—for example, who a speaker consistently faces or gestures toward while expressing expectations—and whether these cues are sufficient for children to infer group preferences, relative status, and leadership suitability. Together, the chapters trace how ordinary communication—both direct and indirect—relates to children's beliefs about social hierarchy, inclusion, and group relations. They identify where adult sociopolitical values and attitudes toward discussing race align (and do not align) with children's ideologies and isolate attentional focus as a plausible nonverbal pathway through which social group bias can be communicated and transmitted to children in everyday settings.