Children's Racial Categorization in Context

Children's gender essentialism and prejudice: Testing causal links via an experimental manipulation

Despite increases in visibility, gender-nonconforming young people continue to be at risk for bullying and discrimination. Prior work has established that gender essentialism in children correlates with prejudice against people who do not conform to gender norms, but to date no causal link has been established. The present study investigated this link more directly by testing whether children's gender essentialism and prejudice against gender nonconformity can be reduced by exposure to anti-essentialist messaging. Children ages 6-10 years of age (N = 102) in the experimental condition viewed a short video describing similarities between boys and girls and variation within each gender; children in the control condition (N = 102) viewed a corresponding video describing similarities between two types of climate and variation within each. Children then received measures of gender essentialism and prejudice against gender nonconformity. Finally, to ask whether manipulating children's gender essentialism extends to another domain, we included assessments of racial essentialism and prejudice. We found positive correlations between gender essentialism and prejudice against gender nonconformity; both also correlated negatively with participant age. However, we observed no differences between children in the experimental versus control conditions in overall essentialism or prejudice, indicating that our video was largely ineffective in manipulating essentialism. Accordingly, we were unable to provide evidence of a causal relationship between essentialism and prejudice. We did, however, see a difference between conditions on the discreteness measure, which is most closely linked to the wording in the video. This finding suggests that specific aspects of essentialism in young children may be modifiable. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Consistent with prior research, we found that greater gender essentialism was associated with greater prejudice against gender-nonconforming children; both decreased with age. We randomly assigned children to view either an anti-essentialist video manipulation or a control video to test if this relation was causal in nature. The anti-essentialist video did not reduce overall essentialism as compared to the control, so we did not find support for a causal link. We observed a reduction in the dimension of essentialism most closely linked to the anti-essentialist video language, suggesting the potential utility of anti-essentialist messaging.

Children and adolescents rectify unequal allocations of leadership duties in the classroom

Little is known about how children and adolescents evaluate unequal teacher allocations of leadership duties based on ethnicity-race and gender in the classroom. U.S. boys and girls, White (40.7%), Multiracial (18.5%), Black/African American (16.0%), Latine (14.2%), Asian (5.5%), Pacific Islander (0.4%), and other (4.7%) ethnic-racial backgrounds, 8-14 years, N = 275, evaluated teacher allocations of high-status leadership positions favoring specific ethnic-racial or gender groups during 2018-2021. Adolescents, more than children, negatively evaluated unequal teacher allocations of leadership duties that resulted in group-based inequalities, expected peers who shared the identity of a group disadvantaged by the teacher's allocation to view it more negatively than others, and rectified inequalities. Understanding perceptions of teacher-based bias provides an opportunity for interventions designed to create fair and just classrooms that motivate all students to achieve.

Free-listing and Semantic Knowledge: A Tool for Detecting Alzheimer Disease?

BACKGROUND

Impairment in semantic knowledge contributes to Alzheimer disease (AD)-related decline. However, the particulars of the impact AD has on specific domains of knowledge remain debatable.

OBJECTIVE

To investigate the impact of AD on specific semantic categories that are integral to daily functions-living things and man-made objects.

METHOD

We administered a free-listing task (written version) to 19 individuals with AD and 15 cognitively normal older adults and assessed the task's relationship with other cognitive and functional tests in clinical use. We compared the contents of the lists of salient concepts generated by the AD and control groups.

RESULTS

Group membership (AD or control), after controlling for age, sex, formal education, and an estimate of premorbid intellectual ability, predicted the groups' performance on the free-listing task across two categories. Functional status was inversely related to performance on the free-listing task, holding demographic variables constant. Based on a comparison of the contents of the free lists that were generated by the two groups, it was possible to conclude that, in individuals with AD, conceptual knowledge central to the respective categories was well preserved, whereas the peripheral conceptual material showed evidence of degradation.

CONCLUSION

The free-listing task, which is an easy-to-administer and cost-effective tool, could aid in the preliminary detection of semantic knowledge dysfunction, revealing concepts that are better preserved and, possibly, the characterization of AD. Cognitive assessment tools that can be applied across cultures are needed, and the free-listing task has the potential to address this gap.

Racial categorization and intergroup perception in preschool children: A focus on group membership and group size in the French context

In the current study, we explored how context influences intergroup perception in 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 242; Mage = 55.5 months, SD = 9.94) in France. We examined the impact of participants' group membership (belonging to a high- vs. low-social-status group) and their group size on the development of racial categorization and the perception of cultural distance. Children completed two tasks using photographs depicting children from the three most represented racial groups in France: Caucasians, Black Africans, and North Africans. In the first task, the free categorization task, they were asked to group photographs of children they thought belonged together. Results revealed that as children grew older, they increasingly grouped children based on their race. In addition, high-social-status (nonmarginalized) children categorized more based on race than low-social-status children. In a second task, children were requested to rate the same photographs on a 5-point Likert scale for perceived cultural distance in three criteria: music, eating habits, and language. Results showed that regardless of their own group membership, children perceived photos representing children of color (North and Black Africans) as culturally more distant than White children on all criteria. However, this bias was not observed in schools where groups have equal numerical status, suggesting a positive impact of environments where groups are numerically equal.

Hypodescent or ingroup overexclusion?: Children's and adults' racial categorization of ambiguous black/white biracial faces

Two processes describe racially ambiguous Black/White Biracial categorization-the one-drop rule, or hypodescent, whereby racially ambiguous people are categorized as members of their socially subordinated racial group (i.e., Black/White Biracial faces categorized as Black) and the ingroup overexclusion effect, whereby racially ambiguous people are categorized as members of a salient outgroup, regardless of the group's status. Without developmental research with racially diverse samples, it is unclear when these categorization patterns emerge. Study 1 included White, Black, and racially diverse Biracial children (aged 3- to 7-years) and their parents to test how racial group membership and social context influence face categorization biases. To provide the clearest test of hypodescent and ingroup overexclusion, White participants came from majority White neighborhoods and Black participants from majority Black neighborhoods (with Biracial participants from more racially diverse neighborhoods)-two samples with prominent racial ingroups. Study 2 aimed to replicate the parent findings with a separate sample of White, Black, Black/White Biracial, and Asian adults. Results suggest the ingroup overexclusion effect is present across populations early in development and persists into adulthood. Additionally, categorization was meaningfully related to parental context, pinpointing a pathway that potentially contributes to ingroup overexclusion. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: White, Black, and racially diverse Biracial children and adults tended to categorize racially ambiguous Black/White Biracial faces as racial outgroup members, even if the outgroup was White. This contradicts most work arguing Black/White Biracial racially ambiguous people are more often seen as Black. Children and parents' categorizations were related, though children's categorizations were not related to socialization above and beyond parents' categorizations. Children showed similar categorization patterns across dichotomous and continuous measures.

Children's evaluations of and reactions to racial discrimination

Despite the potential benefits of children's confrontations of other children's racial biases-especially for targets of bias-little is known about how young children react upon observing instances of racial discrimination. In the present research, child participants completed a novel measure designed to test their reactions to another child's racially discriminatory behavior. The measure presented scenarios in which a protagonist who matched the participant's race (Asian, Latinx, or White) repeatedly excluded Black children from different social activities. Participants evaluated the protagonist's behavior and had an opportunity to confront the protagonist. Both a pilot study and a full preregistered study revealed that the novel measure had high reliability within participants and substantial variability across participants (pilot study: N = 54 U.S. White 5-7-year-olds, 27 girls, 27 boys, median household income range of $125,001-$150,000; full study: N = 126 U.S. 4-10-year-olds, 33.33% Asian, 33.33% Latinx, 33.33% White, 56 girls, 70 boys, median household income: $120,001-$125,000). In the full study, older children and children whose parents reported more racial socialization rated the protagonist's behavior more negatively; older children were also more likely to confront the protagonist. Neither participants' own race nor their prior exposure to racial diversity impacted their evaluations or confrontations of discrimination. The results have implications for understanding children's potential to serve as agents of social change by regulating other children's racial biases and behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Oxytocin attenuates racial categorization in 14-month-old infants

Intergroup bias - the preferential attitudes one holds towards one's social group - is a ubiquitous socio-cognitive phenomenon. In fact, studies show that already in the first months of life, infants manifest a preference for members of their own social group. This points to the possibility of inborn mechanisms involved in social group cognition. Here we assess the effect of a biological activation of infants' affiliative motivation on their social categorization capacity. In a first visit to the lab, mothers self-administered either Oxytocin (OT) or placebo (PL) via a nasal spray and then engaged in a face-to-face interaction with their 14-month-old infants, a procedure previously shown to increase OT levels in infants. Infants then performed a racial categorization task presented on an eye-tracker. Mothers and infants returned a week later and repeated the procedure while self-administering the complementary substance (i.e., PL or OT, respectively). In total, 24 infants completed the two visits. We found that whereas infants in the PL condition on the first visit exhibited racial categorization, infants in the OT condition in their first visit did not. Moreover, these patterns remained a week later despite the change in substance. Thus, OT inhibited racial categorization when infants first encountered the to-be-categorized faces. These findings highlight the role of affiliative motivation in social categorization, and suggest that the neurobiology of affiliation may provide insights on mechanisms that may be involved in the downstream prejudicial consequences of intergroup bias.

Construal level mindsets modulate gender categorizations in preschool children

Social categorization is a crucial information processing strategy that adults deliberately adjust depending on goals and situational requirements. This study investigated whether flexibility in categorization is similarly present among preschool children. More specifically, we tested whether spontaneous gender categorizations are more pronounced for children with a situationally induced abstract compared to concrete construal level mindset. Sixty-one children first participated in a construal mindset induction task before completing a visual variant of the "who said what" memory task. Systematic memory confusions indicated that all children engaged in gender-based social categorization but that this tendency was accentuated in the abstract compared to concrete mindset condition. These results suggest an ability of children to modulate social categorizations. Implications for the development of intergroup biases are discussed.

The developmental trajectories of racial categorization and explicit racial biases in Singapore

The present study investigated the development of racial categorization and explicit racial biases in Singaporean Chinese preschoolers (N = 73). Three- to six-year-olds were found to be generally adept at categorizing novel faces by race and displayed significant improvements in their racial categorization abilities at six years old. Additionally, the strength of children's racial preferences varied along the developmental trajectory. While three- and four-year-olds did not exhibit own-race preferences, five- and six-year-olds preferred to befriend own-race children and preferentially assigned desirable jobs to own-race adults. None of the age groups, however, displayed preferences for either race when assigning undesirable jobs to adults, pointing to an absence of negative outgroup bias from three to six years old. Lastly, children who were better able to categorize novel faces by race also showed stronger tendencies to assign undesirable jobs to other-race adults and thus stronger outgroup negativity. Together, our findings suggest that ingroup positivity precedes outgroup negativity, and that racial categorization plays an important role in the development of negative outgroup bias, hence providing further support for developmental theories on intergroup bias formation.

Promoting positive intergroup attitudes using persona dolls: A vicarious contact intervention program in Israeli kindergartens

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a vicarious contact intervention program for improving knowledge and attitudes of Jewish-Israeli secular and religious children regarding their ingroup and three outgroups: secular/religious Jews, Ethiopian-descendant Jews, and Arabs. One hundred and nine kindergartners participated in a four-week intervention, in which experimenters introduced to them four persona dolls representing the different groups. Accompanied by stories, children were exposed to the dolls’ individual and group characteristics, and to positive encounters between the dolls. A pre- and post-test battery assessed the intervention’s effects on children’s intergroup knowledge and attitudes. Findings revealed an increase in children’s knowledge of the groups, improvements in religious children’s attitudes towards Arabs, and in both secular and religious children’s willingness to sit closer to Ethiopian-descendant children. These findings highlight the potential of indirect contact for reducing intergroup bias in young children living in multicultural and conflict-ridden societies.

Testing the effectiveness of the Developing Inclusive Youth program: A multisite randomized control trial

The Developing Inclusive Youth program is a classroom-based, individually administered video tool that depicts peer-based social and racial exclusion, combined with teacher-led discussions. A multisite randomized control trial was implemented with 983 participants (502 females; 58.5% White, 41.5% Ethnic/racial minority; Mage  = 9.64 years) in 48 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classrooms across six schools. Children in the program were more likely to view interracial and same-race peer exclusion as wrong, associate positive traits with peers of different racial, ethnic, and gender backgrounds, and report play with peers from diverse backgrounds than were children in the control group. Many approaches are necessary to achieve antiracism in schools. This intervention is one component of this goal for developmental science.

Associations between cross-racial friendships and children's social and academic adjustment in racially diverse classrooms

This study examined bidirectional associations between cross-racial friendships and children's social and academic adjustment. Participants were 583 elementary school-age children in western Canada, or the midwestern United States (4-10 years; 279 girls; 143 Asian, 88 Black, 65 Hispanic or Latinx, 171 White, 116 mixed). Children's adjustment (social preference, academic enablers, academic performance) and friendship nominations (reciprocated, received, given) were measured in fall and spring over one school year from 2017 to 2018, or from 2018 to 2019. Regarding reciprocated nominations, fall adjustment positively predicted spring reciprocated cross-racial friendships, but not vice-versa. For received nominations, academic enablers and received cross-racial friendship nominations were positively and bidirectionally related to one another. Fall same-racial friendship nominations positively predicted spring academic performance and social preference. Effect sizes were small.

Reducing Prejudice Through Promoting Cross-Group Friendships

Around the globe, individuals are affected by exclusion, discrimination, and prejudice targeting individuals from racial, ethnic, and immigrant backgrounds as well as crimes based on gender, nationality, and culture (United Nations General Assembly, 2016). Unfortunately, children are often the targeted victims (Costello & Dillard, 2019). What is not widely understood is that the intergroup biases underlying systemic racism start long before adulthood with children displaying notable signs of intergroup bias, sometimes before entering grade school. Intergroup bias refers to the tendency to evaluate members of one’s own group more favorably than someone not identified with one’s group and is typically associated with prejudicial attitudes. Children are both the victims and the perpetrators of bias. In this review, we provide evidence of how biases emerge in childhood, along with an analysis of the significant role of intergroup friendships on enhancing children’s well-being and reducing prejudice in childhood. The review focuses predominantly on the context of race, with the inclusion of several other categories, such as nationality and religion. Fostering positive cross-group friendships in childhood helps to address the negative long-term consequences of racism, discrimination, and prejudice that emerges in childhood and continues through to adulthood.

Developmental Prevention of Prejudice: Conceptual Issues, Evidence-Based Designing, and Outcome Results

This article reviews conceptual and empirical issues on the developmental prevention of prejudice in childhood and adolescence. Developmental prejudice prevention is defined as interventions that intentionally change and promote intergroup attitudes and behavior by systematically recognizing theories and empirical results on the development of prejudice in young people. After presenting a general conception of designing evidence-based interventions, we will discuss the application of this model in the field of developmental prejudice prevention. This includes the legitimation, a developmental concept of change, and the derivation of intervention content and implementation. Finally, we summarized recent evaluations results by reviewing meta-analytical evidence of programs and discuss important issues of future research and practice.

Racial Categorization and Intergroup Relations in Children: The Role of Social Status and Numerical Group Size

The aim of this review was to examine the effect of social and numerical group size on racial categorization and intergroup relations in children. We first described the development of racial categorization and the factors that increase the saliency of the race criterion in different contexts. Then, we examine the role of social status in intergroups relations and show that low status children express lower ingroup favoritism compared to their peers from high status groups. Few studies investigated the role of ingroup size on intergroup biases. Here, we look at this numerical variable through the proportion of children of different racial groups in the school environment. The results show that homogeneous environments contribute to the decrease of bias and negative attitudes. We discuss how identifying specific and interactive effects of the social and numerical group size would allow us to implement early and efficient intervention programs.

Giving priority to race or wealth in peer group contexts involving social inclusion

This study investigated children's and adolescents' predictions regarding intergroup inclusion in contexts where peers differed on two dimensions of group membership: race and wealth. African American and European American participants (N = 153; age range: 8-14 years, M_age = 11.46 years) made predictions about whether afterschool clubs would prefer to include a peer based on race or wealth and reported what they personally thought should happen. Between late childhood and early adolescence, European American participants increasingly expected that afterschool clubs would include a same-wealth peer (even when this peer was of a different race) whereas African American participants increasingly expected that the afterschool clubs would include a same-race peer (even when this peer was of a different level of wealth). Both European American and African American participants themselves thought that the clubs should include a same-wealth peer over a same-race peer, and with age, were increasingly likely to reference perceived comfort when explaining their decision. Future studies on the development of racial preferences will benefit from including wealth status information given that, with age, perceived comfort was associated with same-wealth rather than same-race status. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The Effects of Race, Gender, and Gender-Typed Behavior on Children's Friendship Appraisals

From a young age, children's peer appraisals are influenced by the social categories to which peers belong based on factors such as race and gender. To date, research regarding the manner in which race- and gender-related factors might interact to influence these appraisals has been limited. The present study employed an experimental vignette paradigm to investigate the relative influences of target peers' race, gender, and gender-typed behavior toward 4- to 6-year-old Chinese children's (N = 119, 62 girls, 57 boys) peer appraisals. Appraisals were assessed via (1) a rating scale measuring children's interest in being friends with a range of hypothetical target peers varying in race, gender, and gender-typed behavior, and (2) a forced-choice rank-order task in which children indicated their preferences for four hypothetical target peers who varied from themselves on either race, gender, or gender-typed behavior, or were similar to themselves on all three traits. There was little evidence to suggest children's rank-ordered peer preferences in relation to race were influenced by whether the other-race presented was White (preferred relatively more) or Black (preferred relatively less). In contrast, gender-related factors (i.e., rater gender, target gender, target gender-typed behavior) had more robust influences on peer preferences for both outcome measures. Gender-conforming peers were preferred over gender-nonconforming peers, and target boys displaying feminine behavior were less preferred than target girls displaying masculine behavior. The results help characterize cross-cultural (in)consistencies in children's social preferences in relation to peers' race and gender.

The dual pandemics of COVID-19 and racism: impact on early childhood development and implications for physicians

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted healthcare and racial inequities. This article discusses recent literature documenting the impact of racism on early childhood development, disparities in access to developmental services and ways healthcare providers and health systems can promote physician well being during these difficult times.

RECENT FINDINGS

Exposure to racism begins prenatally, and early childhood experiences with racism are intimately tied to adverse physical and mental health outcomes. Early intervention is key to treating children with developmental delay, but disparities exist in accessing eligibility screening and in the provision of services. Paediatric providers are at risk of developing secondary traumatic stress and burnout, which may affect the care that they provide.

SUMMARY

New research has led to the development of resources that help paediatric providers address racism, access developmental resources in a novel manner and protect the paediatric workforce from trauma and burnout.

Why do children essentialize social groups?

The tendency to essentialize social groups is universal, and arises early in development. This tendency is associated with negative intergroup attitudes and behaviors, and has thus encouraged the search for remedies for the emergence of essentialism. In this vein, great attention has been devoted to uncovering the cognitive foundations of essentialism. In this chapter, I suggest that attention should also be turned toward the motivational foundations of essentialism. I propose that considerations of power and group identity, but especially a "need to belong," may encourage children's essentialization of social groups. Namely, from a young age, children are keen to feel members of a group, and that their membership is secure and exclusive. Essentialism is the conceptual gadget that satisfies these feelings. And to the extent that groups are defined by what they do, this motivated essentialism also impels children to be adamant about the maintenance of unique group behaviors.

The Roles of Group Status and Group Membership in the Practice of Hypodescent

Hypodescent emerged in U.S. history to reinforce racial hierarchy. Research suggests that among contemporary U.S. adults, hypodescent continues to shape social perception. Among U.S. children, however, hypodescent is less likely to be endorsed. Here, we tested for hypodescent by introducing U.S. children (ages 4-9) and adults (N = 273) to hierarchically ordered novel groups (one was high status and another was low status) and then to a child who had one parent from each group. In Study 1, we presented the groups in a third-party context. In Study 2, we randomly assigned participants to the high-status or the low-status group. Across both studies, participants did not reliably endorse hypodescent, raising questions as to what elicits this practice.

Thinking through other minds: A variational approach to cognition and culture

The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are shared habits, norms, and expectations learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of culture? Notions such as "shared expectations," the "selective patterning of attention and behaviour," "cultural evolution," "cultural inheritance," and "implicit learning" are the main candidates to underpin a unifying account of cognition and the acquisition of culture; however, their interactions require greater specification and clarification. In this article, we integrate these candidates using the variational (free-energy) approach to human cognition and culture in theoretical neuroscience. We describe the construction by humans of social niches that afford epistemic resources called cultural affordances. We argue that human agents learn the shared habits, norms, and expectations of their culture through immersive participation in patterned cultural practices that selectively pattern attention and behaviour. We call this process "thinking through other minds" (TTOM) - in effect, the process of inferring other agents' expectations about the world and how to behave in social context. We argue that for humans, information from and about other people's expectations constitutes the primary domain of statistical regularities that humans leverage to predict and organize behaviour. The integrative model we offer has implications that can advance theories of cognition, enculturation, adaptation, and psychopathology. Crucially, this formal (variational) treatment seeks to resolve key debates in current cognitive science, such as the distinction between internalist and externalist accounts of theory of mind abilities and the more fundamental distinction between dynamical and representational accounts of enactivism.

Cultural Snapshots: A Method to Capture Social Contexts in Development of Prejudice and Stereotyping

The scientific identification of how social environments transmit intergroup biases is a transparently complex endeavor. Existing research has examined the emergence of intergroup biases such as racial prejudice and stereotypes in many ways, including correlations between racial diversity and children's prejudice, content analyses of features in the media, or experiments testing the influence of selected variables with unknown prevalence in children's environments. Yet, these approaches have left unanswered how the social environments that children engage with cause them to acquire racial prejudice and stereotypes. We provide a review of the existing literature on socialization of racial prejudice and stereotypes and then present a methodological approach that can be used to quantify and test causal relations between the features of children's social environments and intergroup biases. We provide examples of how this method has and can be used alongside a discussion of unique considerations when applied to child samples.

Examining Children's Implicit Racial Attitudes Using Exemplar and Category-Based Measures

The goal of this research was to examine children's implicit racial attitudes. Across three studies, a total of 359 White 5- to 12-year-olds completed child-friendly exemplar (Affective Priming Task; Affect Misattribution Procedure) and category-based (Implicit Association Test) implicit measures of racial attitudes. Younger children (5- to 8-year-olds) showed automatic ingroup positivity toward White child exemplars, whereas older children (9- to 12-year-olds) did not. Children also showed no evidence of automatic negativity toward Black exemplars, despite demonstrating consistent pro-White versus Black bias on the category-based measure. Together, the results suggest that (a) implicit ingroup and outgroup attitudes can follow distinct developmental trajectories, and (b) the spontaneous activation of implicit intergroup attitudes can depend on the salience of race.

To Be or Not to Be (Black or Multiracial or White)

Culture shapes the meaning of race and, consequently, who is placed into which racial categories. Three experiments conducted in the United States and Brazil illustrated the cultural nature of racial categorization. In Experiment 1, a target’s racial ancestry influenced Americans’ categorizations but had no impact on Brazilians’ categorizations. Experiment 2 showed cultural differences in the reliance on two phenotypic cues to race; Brazilians’ categorizations were more strongly determined by skin tone than were Americans’ categorizations, and Americans’ categorizations were more strongly determined by other facial features compared to Brazilians' categorizations. Experiment 3 demonstrated cultural differences in the motivated use of racial categories. When the racial hierarchy was threatened, only Americans more strictly enforced the Black–White racial boundary. Cultural forces shape the conceptual, perceptual, and ideological construal of racial categories.

Face race processing and racial bias in early development: A perceptual-social linkage

Infants have asymmetrical exposure to different types of faces (e.g., more human than other-species, more female than male, and more own-race than other-race). What are the developmental consequences of such experiential asymmetry? Here we review recent advances in research on the development of cross-race face processing. The evidence suggests that greater exposure to own- than other-race faces in infancy leads to developmentally early perceptual differences in visual preference, recognition, category formation, and scanning of own- and other-race faces. Further, such perceptual differences in infancy may be associated with the emergence of implicit racial bias, consistent with a Perceptual-Social Linkage Hypothesis. Current and future work derived from this hypothesis may lay an important empirical foundation for the development of intervention programs to combat the early occurrence of implicit racial bias.

Racial Categorization Predicts Implicit Racial Bias in Preschool Children

This research investigated the relation between racial categorization and implicit racial bias in majority and minority children. Chinese and Indian 3‐ to 7‐year‐olds from Singapore (N = 158) categorized Chinese and Indian faces by race and had their implicit and explicit racial biases measured. Majority Chinese children, but not minority Indian children, showed implicit bias favoring own race. Regardless of ethnicity, children's racial categorization performance correlated positively with implicit racial bias. Also, Chinese children, but not Indian children, displayed explicit bias favoring own race. Furthermore, children's explicit bias was unrelated to racial categorization performance and implicit bias. The findings support a perceptual–social linkage in the emergence of implicit racial bias and have implications for designing programs to promote interracial harmony.

Stories that move them: Changing children's behaviour toward diverse peers

Globally, our social worlds are becoming increasingly racially and ethnically diverse. Despite this, little attention has been given to how children negotiate this diversity. In this study we examine whether a value-in-diversity storybook intervention encourages young children to engage in intergroup contact with racially diverse peers. The lunchroom seating behaviour of 4- to 6-year-olds attending three racially diverse primary schools was recorded at three different points during a one-week period. Seating behaviour was coded based on the race of the children and levels of segregation were calculated (Campbell et al., 1996). Before hearing the story, we observed racial self-segregation; children were more likely to sit with same-race peers. However, immediately following the story, children were no longer significantly racially segregated. This effect was not maintained; up to 48 hours later children again showed evidence of racial self-segregation. Our findings suggest that exposure to racially diverse peers alone is not sufficient for promoting intergroup contact. We argue that it is vital to develop sustainable teacher-led interventions if we are to harness the potential of diverse school settings for bolstering intergroup relations.

Cultural Affordances: Scaffolding Local Worlds Through Shared Intentionality and Regimes of Attention

In this paper we outline a framework for the study of the mechanisms involved in the engagement of human agents with cultural affordances. Our aim is to better understand how culture and context interact with human biology to shape human behavior, cognition, and experience. We attempt to integrate several related approaches in the study of the embodied, cognitive, and affective substrates of sociality and culture and the sociocultural scaffolding of experience. The integrative framework we propose bridges cognitive and social sciences to provide (i) an expanded concept of ‘affordance’ that extends to sociocultural forms of life, and (ii) a multilevel account of the socioculturally scaffolded forms of affordance learning and the transmission of affordances in patterned sociocultural practices and regimes of shared attention. This framework provides an account of how cultural content and normative practices are built on a foundation of contentless basic mental processes that acquire content through immersive participation of the agent in social practices that regulate joint attention and shared intentionality.

Black Pete through the Eyes of Dutch Children

The traditional figure of Black Pete seen during the December festivities around Sinterklaas (the Dutch Santa Claus) in the Netherlands has sparked fierce debates about his racial stereotypical characteristics and his potentially negative effects on children’s opinions about black people. The Black Pete phenomenon has even been discussed by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, resulting in a report urging the Netherlands to eliminate this form of racial stereotyping. The adult debate about Black Pete is clearly important, but Sinterklaas is essentially a children’s holiday. Surprisingly, there have never been any systematic studies to examine children’s views on Black Pete. The current study is the first to do so. In a sample of 201 children aged 5–7 years, we collected free descriptions of Black Pete, asked children to group him in relation to other figures, and to assign characteristics to him and comparison figures. The results showed that (1) Children are clearly aware of Black Pete’s skin color and subordinate status; (2) Children associate Black Pete more with clowns than with black people; (3) Children evaluate Black Pete very positively, but the positive characteristics do not generalize to their evaluation of black people. The findings illustrate the deep-rooted childhood origins of many Dutch people’s affection for Black Pete and their lack of awareness of his relation to racial stereotypes. This explains the resistance to changing the Black Pete figure and the slowness of the change process on this front.