Lecture 9 Flashcards
How do infants understand race? Re watch this part of the video.
- Infants → prefer familiar race faces,
respond to race as a perceptual category
(very early on infants show sensitivity to race as a perceptual category. Babies tend to look longer to people of their own race than other races. This seems to be very perceptually based )
- By 3-4 years → can explicitly
characterize race, reason about skin
colour as stable characteristic
(we can see that 3-4 year olds can explicitly categorize race and by about 4 years they seem to think about skin colour as something that is stable across development. )
- Later in development → start reasoning
about race as a stable and informative
feature of identity beyond appearance
(“essentialism”) - Earlier for children from marginalized racial
groups?
(if you look in countries where there is more ethnic conflict and hierarchy, this seems to contribute to this essentialist thinking as well. kids from marginalized racial groups tend to think about this essentialism sooner. They have to deal with prejudice or implicit or explicit information about race. it is common for kids to do racial essentialism. Thinking race is stable and informative. If you ask the kids about something other than skin colour, like traits etc. they think race is contributing to this. starting somewhere around 6-10 kids now begin to think they would be a different kind of person if they changed their race. Like if I became black I would be good at sports. If I became asian, I would become smarter. Just because kids start doing this at this age, does not mean it is accurate. It is an innaccurate way of thinking about the world. )
What is the switched at birth reasoning?
they are told a story of two couples that have babies. There is a black couple and a white couple and the babies get switched at birth. Now this baby is grown up, its ready to start school, which of these kids is that baby? Three year olds don’t respond that consistently. It isn’t until age 4 that kids think about skin colour as something that is stable regardless of their nurture (environment). It seems like this stability is fairly limited to skin colour. Not necessarily thinking about race as something that is deeper in identity and culture.
What are kids attitudes towards race?
we have the idea that kids are aware of race early on. BUT we often also have attitudes and biases according to race. It is not uncommon for people to feel more positively to their oewn groups
How does explicit bias show up in children?
Explicit Bias
* Can be expressed directly
* Aware of bias
* Can deliberately access
* Easily controlled
- In dominant racial groups
→in-group positivity + out-
group negativity - Decline with development
(we tend to express more positivty to our own racial groups and more negativity towards outgroups. BUT this seems to shift witho development. Children show greater positivity to their own groups. )
What did the Baron & Banaji 2006 paper find?
LOOK AT THIS GRAPH. DON”T NOT DO IT.
they show a white kid and a black kid and ask who would you like to play with? 6 year olds often pick the kid who is their same racial group
What are the findings about intergroup biases in germany?
throughout development, they are feeling pretty positively about white individuals, the 5 and 6 year olds have a clear in group bias (rating individuals of outgroup more negatively). Overtime, white kids become less positive about their own race.
exposure to more diversity? Maybe a shift in social desirability, maybe they know they shouldn’t say it but they still think it.
people used to think about it in terms of decrease in egocentricism. As people get older they can move away from their own perspective and think about others’ perspectives.
Is intergroup bias the same for marginalized racial groups?
they had black children and they showed them different dolls. They asked them questions about their explicit preferences/explicit atitudes.
Clarks doll study (1947) these studies were used in court cases to prove the harm caused by segregation.
In marginalized racial
groups?
* Less in-group positivity
- Increased in-group positivity
with development?
(sometimes you do see that their is a preference for ones own race but their is less of that positivity. )
(they found that children are showing a pro-black preference in childhood and this increases by the time they get to be young adults. )
what are implicit biases in children?
Implicit Bias
- Beliefs, attitudes that are
activated in response to
social cues - May have less awareness
- May be more difficult to
control
in recent years researchers have become increasingly interested in not just explicit biases but also implicit biases.
What is the implicit association test?
- Measures the strength of
association between
concept (i.e., race) and
attribute (i.e. evaluation,
good vs. bad) - Response time→ faster
response suggests a
stronger association (ie,
between white + good)
(people might claim not to be racist, but then the name on an application may impact who they think is more qualified etc. )
(its looking at the strength of an association between race and an evaluation between good and bad. )
What does the IAT show for individuals from dominant racial groups?
- In individuals from
dominant racial groups →
positive in-group bias
Implicit Bias
* Beliefs, attitudes that are
activated in response to
social cues
* May have less awareness,
* May be more difficult to
control
there actually seems to be no differences. This does not seem to change with development. In white folks, everyone is showing a pro-white preference. This brings us back to the explicit vs implicit. People are getting less likely to explicitly express their biases as they get older but that does not mean that their biases are decreasing.
- In individuals from
marginalized racial groups?
What does the IAT show for individuals from marginalized racial groups?
In individuals from
marginalized racial groups?
* No in-group preference; no
out-group preference
Implicit Bias
* Expressed indirectly
* Outside of awareness
* Difficult to control
here what we see is kind of interesting and sometimes a little bit confusing. There is a pro-ingroup bias, for individuals from non-diminant racial groups, there is no ingroup preference butthere is also no outgroup preference.
What are 2 things that contribute to the development of attitudes about race?
example from latinx groups in US?
- intergroup bias (I like people
like me!) - Social norms;
social/cultural
evaluation of
dominance (These are the
messages I am getting
from society about
people like me and
how we ”rank”
compared to others…)
we may be biased to like people like us. Maybe there is a sense of belonging or safety.
as a white person, they have a preference for people like them, and society is giving you messaging about pro-white biases. This contributes to a pro-white bias.
as a marginalized person, you may have a preference for people like you but society is still giving you pro white preferences info so these 2 factors may be competing against each other.
In US: social hierarchy often
regarded as
White > Latinx/e > Black
one IAT compating latin american to white. There is no difference there. But with the same kids when they do the IAT with a compairson between LAtin and black. there ia bias between latin american compared to blakc. The like me positivity is showing and now those social norms of dominance are aligning with that.
this is looking at Latinx latin american chidren in the US. In the US the hierarchy message that you are often getting is white dominance. Often see black as least priveleged and latin americans as somewhere in between.
how do intergroup biases relate to biracial people? Why does this question matter?
very little data.
we have some adult data. Biracial adults seem to be a little bit in between. There is a slight pro-white preference but less so than monoracial individuals. there is very little research on this.
could show how acquired the bias is?
WATCH THIS WHOLE VIDEO AGAIN IF YOU CAN
