Racial bias exists everywhere. It is a form of implicit bias which refers to how and why we feel and act the way we do towards others outside our own race.
Understanding our own racial bias is a struggle but understanding it will help communities heal by improving our relations with others from different racial groups.
When we consider why someone has a racial bias, we often think of negative experiences he or she may have had with other-race individuals.
But findings from two studies suggest that a race-based bias begins at a young age even without any experience with other race individuals.
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Researchers from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto and their collaborators from the US, UK, France and China, show that six- to nine-month-old infants demonstrate racial bias by favouring of members of their own race.
In the first study infants from 3 to 10 months of age watched a sequence of videos about female adults with neutral expressions. Before viewing each face the infants heard a music clip. They then participated in one of the four music-face combinations: happy music followed by own-race faces, sad music followed by own-race faces, happy music followed by other-race faces, and sad music followed by other-race faces.
The study found that the babies looked at own race faces longer when paired with happy music as opposed to sad music. It was the opposite with other race faces where the babies viewed other race faces longer when associated with sad music rather than when happy music was played.
In the second study, which examined if infants were biased towards learning from own race adults versus other race adult. To investigate this, infants, six to eighth month olds, watched a series of videos. In these videos, a female adult looked at any four corners of the screen. Following the gaze, an animal would appear at that position called the looked-at-location or reliable gaze. At other times an animal appeared at the unreliable gaze or the non-looked-at location.
The study showed that the babies followed the gaze of their own race more than that of a person not from their race. This occurred when the faces were slightly unreliable as they are in their natural environment, suggesting that infants were biased to learn from own–race adults when uncertain.
The results of these two studies show that race-based bias exists around the second half of a child’s first year, challenging previous popular view that race-based bias only starts during the preschool years.
The findings also suggest that a race-based bias emerges without experience with other-race individuals because prior studies have indicated that many infants typically experience over 90 per cent own-race faces. Following this, the current two studies involved babies who had little experience with other-race individuals.
The researchers emphasise that the findings of these studies is important in the prevention of racial bias which can permeate almost all our social interactions – both in the explicit and implicit form.
By understanding how and where racial bias begins, is the first step in finding ways to prevents racial bias from happening.
And one way of doing that is for parents to expose their infants and introduced their children to a variety of races as children will learn from people they are exposed to.
Source: Child Development, Developmental Science
