Children's Attractiveness, Gender, and Race Biases: A Comparison of Their Strength and Generality

Abstract

Although research suggests that facial attractiveness biases significantly affect social development and interactions, these biases are understudied in the developmental literature and are overlooked when designing interventions relative to gender and race. The authors, therefore, compared how much bias 3-11-year-olds (N=102) displayed in the three domains. They also examined whether bias and flexibility (understanding that different social groups can possess similar attributes) were related across domains. Children's attractiveness biases, particularly for girl targets, were as strong as or stronger than gender or race biases. Flexibility, but not bias, was related across domains. Developmental scientists and policymakers should increase efforts toward understanding development of attractiveness biases and determine which methods of teaching flexibility are most successful at reducing bias across domains.Stereotypes are beliefs about a social group that affect how perceivers process information about category members and often result in biased attitudes (positive or negative associations) toward members of particular social groups (Allport, 1954;Hamilton & Trolier, 1986). Even young children (3-to 4-year-olds) display biases based on gender, race, and facial attractiveness (e.g., Dion, 1973;Powlishta, 1995b), but it is unclear how these biases compare in terms of strength. One study with 6-and 10-year-old children, however, showed facial attractiveness influenced their attributions and peer preferences more so than race (Langlois & Stephan, 1977), suggesting attractiveness biases may be particularly robust.It is important to assess bias strength in the three domains because of their impact on judgments of interpersonal attributes and competence (Eagly, 1995;Langlois et al., 2000;Talaska, Fiske, & Chaiken, 2008). In addition, facial attractiveness biases are often overlooked in terms of public policy and receive less developmental scientific inquiry compared to gender and race biases. For example, a recent social policy report that encouraged designing interventions within a developmental framework that promoted "equity, tolerance, and justice" mentioned gender, race, and ethnicity as characteristics NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptChild Dev. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2014 July 22. Published in final edited form as:Child Dev. 2014 July ; 85(4): 1401-1418. doi:10.1111/cdev.12226. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript children use to discriminate others, but not attractiveness (Killen, Rutland, & Ruck, 2011). A PsycINFO search on November 11, 2013 using the terms "bias," "development," and either "gender," "race," or "attractiveness" produced 646, 279, and 23 results, respectively, indicating that development of attractiveness bias is under-researched compared to development of gender and race bias. If attractiveness influences children's biases as much as or more than gender and race, it is critical to better understand their development and to make attrac...

Can White children grow up to be Black? Children’s reasoning about the stability of emotion and race.

“…Moreover, these data contribute to a growing body of research demonstrating that in the presence of competing information (e.g., gender, attractiveness, accent, coalitions), younger White children often do not privilege race (e.g., Rennels & Langlois, 2014; Rhodes, 2013). Critically, these data suggest that even when the competing feature is highly salient but understood to be non-stable, young White children do not conceptualize race as stable.…”

“…They believe that gender (more than race) marks different “kinds” of people (Rhodes & Gelman, 2009), and when asked with whom they want to be friends or share preferences, they select children of the same-gender or same-accent, more than those of the same-race (Kinzler, Shutts, Dejesus, & Spelke, 2009; Shutts, Pemberton Roben, & Spelke, 2013). Children also privilege attractiveness, such that they infer that attractive people have positive traits and unattractive people have negative traits, and are less likely to make trait inferences on the basis of race (Rennels & Langlois, 2014). …”

Children’s classification and lexicalization of attractiveness, gender, and race: Differential displays of these concepts and relatedness to bias and flexibility

“…During the preschool years, children play more amicably when they are similar in attractiveness rather than dissimilar in attractiveness (Langlois & Downs, 1979). Moreover, the children in this study showed very strong displays of bias based on attractiveness (Rennels & Langlois, 2014). Adults rated the attractiveness of individuals in these studies, so these differential judgments and behaviors provide strong evidence that very young children perceive attractiveness similarly to adults and make functional use of attractiveness during social interactions; our results show they just do not yet have a well-established concept of this classification.…”

“…They were also less accurate at sorting and labeling others by attractiveness than by gender or race and showed no agreement with adults in how they self-rated their attractiveness compared to strong agreement with adults in how they self-rated their gender or skin tone. Children’s concept of attractiveness therefore appears to be less explicit and less developed than that of gender and race, even though their perception of attractiveness is at a relatively adult-like level as evidenced by these same children showing strong attractiveness biases (Rennels & Langlois, 2014). These results suggest children may be less aware of their functional use of attractiveness to judge others compared to gender and race, which may impact their ability to control such bias (Devine, 1989).…”

“…Data were from 103 children aged 3 years, 4 months to 11 years, 6 months ( M = 6.27 years, SD = 2.01; 53 females) who also participated in Rennels and Langlois’ (2014) study. Research assistants contacted local schools and families via letters and phone calls to recruit their participation.…”