A cross‐cultural investigation of children’s implicit attitudes toward White and Black racial outgroups

Abstract

Initial theory and research examining children's implicit racial attitudes suggest that an implicit preference favoring socially advantaged groups emerges early in childhood and remains stable across development (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji, 2008). In two studies, we examined the ubiquity of this theory by measuring non-Black minority and non-White majority children's implicit racial attitudes toward White and Black racial outgroups in two distinct cultural contexts. In Study 1, non-Black minority children in an urban North American community with a large Black population showed an implicit pro-White (versus Black) bias in early childhood. Contrary to previous findings, the magnitude of this bias was lower among older children. In Study 2, Malay (majority) and Chinese (minority) children and adults in the Southeast Asian country of Brunei, with limited contact with White or Black peers, showed an implicit pro-White (versus Black) bias in early childhood. However, the magnitude of bias was greater for adults. Together, these findings support initial theorizing about the early development of implicit intergroup cognition, but suggest that context may affect these biases across development to a greater extent than was previously thought. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgQP8e4MSCk&feature=youtu.be.

Children's implicit attitude acquisition: Evaluative statements succeed, repeated pairings fail

“…This age‐related similarity appears robust across attitudes toward Black versus White Americans (Baron & Banaji, ; Newheiser & Olson, ), Hispanic versus White Americans (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji, ), religious groups (Heiphetz, Spelke, Harris, & Banaji, ), and even minimal groups (Dunham, Baron, & Carey, ). This ‘developmental invariance’ also generalizes across cultures (Cvencek, Meltzoff, & Kapur, ; Dunham, Newheiser, Hoosain, Merrill, & Olson, ; Qian et al, ; Rutland, Cameron, Milne, & Mcgeorge, ; Steele, George, Williams, & Tay, ). Such consistency suggests that ‘developmental invariance may represent a core property of the implicit associative system’ (p. 51, Baron, ).…”

The Early Development of Racial Bias in Infants and Childhood

“…In the Ch-IAT, they added several child-friendly features, such as replace adult faces with children faces, use recoded voice instead of printed words, and used large Jellybean buttons instead of keys. Using this method, researchers have found that White children in the United State showed implicit pro-white biases (Baron & Banaji, 2006; see similar results in White children in Canada, Steele et al, 2018). Specifically, the researchers found that White children of 6-and 10-years old reacted more rapidly when they saw White pictures associated with good words than when African American faces associated with good words (Baron & Banaji, 2006).…”

The Project Implicit International Dataset: Measuring Implicit and Explicit Social Group Attitudes and Stereotypes Across 34 Countries (2009–2019)

“…A fourth, and considerably smaller, set of studies includes those that tackle the two-way intersections of these three key features (implicit/explicit, multiple countries, multiple years). For instance, a handful of studies have measured both implicit and explicit attitudes across a small set of countries (e.g., China, Canada, Cameroon), revealing systematic patterns of implicit ingroup preferences across multiple cultures (Qian et al, 2016;Steele et al, 2018). However, these types of studies include data from only a single moment in time.…”