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Founded by Dr. Marco Stoffel, the Third Millennium Foundation's principal goal is to support initiatives designed to promote tolerance, particularly among the young. Its work is focused on developing young children's understanding of and respect for the differences that exist among themselves, especially those related to culture, ethnicity, gender, race, and socioeconomic status. Learn more about the Foundation.
- How do we develop the capacity to care for and respect others whom we perceive as different from ourselves with respect to national, gender, racial, ethnic, and other identities?
- What effects do early social experiences of tolerant or prejudicial environments have on the later wellness or illness of children, especially those growing up under adverse social conditions?
A group of five Harvard faculty members
from different disciplines: social psychology, human rights
law, child psychiatry, educational anthropology, and developmental
psychology has formed a Research Consortium. The aim of
the Research Consortium is to strengthen our understanding
of several common themes. One common theme is the linkages
between cultural forms of tolerance and prejudice experienced
by children and youth, and the forms of positive or negative
orientations to others they develop later in life.
An initial goal of the Research Consortium is to develop a range of assessment methods that can be used in future longitudinal studies to study these questions. A second goal is to determine the applicability of usable knowledge from these projects to assess programs that promote mental health and prevent mental illness in children and youth. For example, Mahzarin Banaji is studying implicit bias in young children and Robert Selman is developing methods to assess children's conscious reflective awareness of prejudice and tolerance. How can these methods be used together to assess in a comprehensive way interventions designed to reduce negative bias and promote social understanding?
Prejudice and intolerance, like viruses and bacteria, can be the source of illness and ill health in children, but little is known about how this works. As Felton Earls points out in his project, living under conditions of stigma, hatred, and intolerance is at best traumatic; more often it leads to a chronic lack of wellness expressed as anger and bitterness, diagnosable disorder, or both. What are the effects of negative bias toward others on the self as well as others, in individuals and in groups? Living under conditions of tolerance, conversely, should have the opposite effect, but how can we demonstrate this? As Mica Pollock suggests, activism may be one of the best forms of prevention against hopelessness and despair that lead to depression. Jacqueline Bhabha is studying an especially vulnerable group: forcibly migrated children fleeing war or persecution and traveling alone in search of safety. She asks, are these children, burdened by the double jeopardy of alienate and minority status, also legally discriminated against when they seek asylum? If so, what are the effects?
The consortium welcomes inquiries about its research and the scientific methods it is designing.
Find out about the Projects
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