Developing cognitions about race: White 5‐ to 10‐year‐olds' perceptions of hardship and pain

Abstract

White American adults assume that Blacks feel less pain than do Whites, but only if they believe that Blacks have faced greater economic hardship than Whites. The current study investigates when in development children first recognize racial group differences in economic hardship and examines whether perceptions of hardship inform children's racial bias in pain perception. Five‐ to 10‐year‐olds (N = 178) guessed which of two items (low versus high value) belonged to a Black and a White child and rated the amount of pain a Black and a White child would feel in 10 painful situations. By age 5, White American children attributed lower‐value possessions to Blacks than Whites, indicating a recognition of racial group differences in economic hardship. The results also replicated the emergence of a racial bias in pain perception between 5 and 10. However, unlike adults', children's perceptions of hardship do not account for racial bias in pain perception.

The Developmental Origins of Dehumanization

“…First, children may initially attribute human-like qualities equally to members of their own group and other groups but come, over time, to dehumanize members of perceived outgroups. Evidence for this developmental pattern is supported to some extent by McLoughlin et al (2017) who found that 6-year-olds perceived less humanness in outgroup faces than did 5-year-olds and Dore and colleagues who showed that the belief outgroup children experience less pain than do ingroup children increases with age (Dore et al, 2014(Dore et al, , 2017). An alternative possibility is that children may differ in their perceptions of ingroup and outgroup members from as early as it is possible to measure their behavior.…”

“…This developmental trend is mirrored in work examining the related construct of pain perception (Loughnan et al, 2010;Waytz, Gray, Epley, & Wegner, 2010). In two studies, White children's belief that Black children feel less pain than do other White children gradually emerged between the ages of 5 and 10 (Dore, Hoffman, Lillard, & Trawalter, 2014;Dore, Hoffman, Lillard, & Trawalter, 2017). Interestingly, both McLoughlin et al (2017) and Dore et al (2014) also found that increases in children's dehumanizing biases were not correlated with their explicit preferences for members of their own group.…”

The relations of White parents’ implicit racial attitudes to their children’s differential empathic concern toward White and Black victims

“…One possible reason is that previous studies used artificial groups (based on T-shirt color) (e.g., Masten et al, 2010) rather than social groups such as race. Another reason may be that other studies did not examine children's emotional reactions but rather tested children's cognitive attributions toward ingroup and outgroup members in terms of human-liked traits and pain experiences in the experimental settings (e.g., Dore et al, 2018;McLoughlin et al, 2018). To our knowledge, this study is one of the first to examine children's moral emotional reactions to racial ingroup and outgroup victims in realistic social injustice settings.…”

“…What is less clear is whether children differentiate their concern based on the race of the recipients. There is evidence that White elementary schoolaged children assume that White children experience higher levels of pain in daily pain experience than Black children (Dore, Hoffman, Lillard, & Trawalter, 2018). In addition, researchers have found that children as young as 5 to 7 years tend to attribute more human-like traits and positive emotions to ingroup versus outgroup members (e.g., gender and geographic groups: McLoughlin, Tipper, & Over, 2018; racial group: Williams & Steele, 2019).…”

Less “human” than us: dehumanisation as a psychological barrier to the integration of migrants

“…More broadlyr elated to this harmful phenomenon, Dore and colleagues (Dore et al 2014;Dore et al 2017)f ound that the belief that Black children feel less pain than do other White children graduallye mergesb etween the ages of five and tena mong White participants in the US.C has et al (2018b) have alsoe xplored the effect that group membership has for children'su nderstanding of others' pain. They were interested in judgements of both physical…”