Now you see race, now you don’t: Verbal cues influence children’s racial stability judgments

Abstract

Research suggests that young children do not consistently believe that race is stable (e.g., that a Black child will grow up to be a Black adult). Here, we testedthe strength of White and minority children's beliefs by testing whether verbal cues influenced the extent to which they believed in the relative stability of race versus emotional expression. We presented participants (5-6 years, 9-10 years, adults) with images of children who were Black or White, and happy or angry, and asked them to indicate which of two adults each child would grow up to be: one matching on emotion but not race, or one matching on race but not emotion. Verbal cuing had strong effects on both younger and older children's choices (e.g., cuing emotional expressions strengthened emotion-matches; cuing skin color strengthened race-matches), although racial minorities were less susceptible to cuing. Verbal cues had weaker effects on children's judgments about the stability of gender. These results show that race concepts vary across age and racial groups,that verbalframing influencesyounger and older children's beliefs about racial stability, and that belief in racial stability isrelatively weakbetween the ages of 5 and 10.

The Nature and Consequences of Essentialist Beliefs About Race in Early Childhood

“…Participants were then asked a series of questions about what the adopted child would both look like and what he or she would be like , as the child grew older. Because the use of category labels can lead children to use categories within experimental tasks when they would not otherwise do so (Dunham, Baron, & Carey, ; Roberts & Gelman, ; Waxman, ), children were not provided with racial labels at any point in the procedure. This approach permitted us to examine children's spontaneous use of racial categories.…”

The Roles of Group Status and Group Membership in the Practice of Hypodescent

“…Thus, the children in these samples may not have recognized race‐based status differences, which could explain the absence of hypodescent in that work. Indeed, children from this context have been shown to have remarkably flexible concepts of race (Rhodes & Gelman, ; Roberts & Gelman, ; Roberts & Gelman, ).…”

“…In Study 2, participants were randomly assigned to either the high‐status or the low‐status group, which enabled us to examine participants’ reasoning when they themselves were situated within the hierarchy. We included an age range of children 4–9 years, because this is when social concepts undergo important changes regarding structure, inferences, and categorization (Hirschfeld & Gelman, ; Pauker, Williams, & Steele, ; Rhodes & Mandalaywala, ; Roberts & Gelman, , ). Additionally, U.S. children at this age have been found to be less likely than U.S. adults to use hypodescent (Roberts & Gelman, ).…”

Racial Inequality in Psychological Research: Trends of the Past and Recommendations for the Future

“…As another example, individuals raised in relatively collectivistic contexts often focus on others, whereas those raised in relatively individualistic contexts often focus on themselves, which can give rise to racial differences in memory construction and recall (Wang, 2019; Wang, Song, & Koh, 2017). During and after a lifetime of such racialized experiences, including those involving access to social resources, experiences with discrimination, interracial contact, social norms, social segregation, and socioeconomic status, it is no surprise that race plays a critical role in psychological phenomena, including but not limited to those involving activism, auditory and visual processing, conformity, emotions, executive functioning, interpersonal relationships, memory, neural activity, parenting, psychological and physiological health, and religious cognition (see Anyiwo, Bañales, Rowley, Watkins, & Richards-Schuster, 2018; Brown, Mistry, & Yip, 2019; Lewis, Goto, & Kong, 2008; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Mattis & Jagers, 2001; Mays, Cochran, & Barnes, 2007; McLoyd, 1990; Medin, 2017; Neblett & Roberts, 2013; Newheiser & Olson, 2012; Perrachione et al, 2010; Philbrook, Hinnant, Elmore-Staton, Buckhalt, & El-Sheikh, 2017; Quinn et al, 2019; Rhodes & Gelman, 2009; Richeson & Shelton, 2003; Richeson & Sommers, 2016; Roberts et al, 2020; Roberts & Gelman, 2015, 2016, 2017; Roberts, Guo, Ho, & Gelman, 2018; Rogers, 2019; Syed, 2017; Tsai, 2007; Wang, 2019).…”

“…Evidence for this emerges early in development. For example, in the United States, White children experience racial diversity and discrimination less often than do children of color, and White parents speak with their children about race less often than do parents of color, which results in White children being less focused on race and less sensitive to racial issues than are children of color (Hughes, 2003; Pahlke, Bigler, & Suizzo, 2012; Perry, Skinner, & Abaied, 2019; Quinn et al, 2019; Roberts & Gelman, 2016, 2017). By adulthood, White persons are more likely than persons of color (POCs) to avoid conversations about race, potentially because they feel inexperienced in the subject or because they are motivated, either consciously or unconsciously, to maintain an illusion of postracialism (Apfelbaum, Pauker, Ambady, Sommers, & Norton, 2008; Bonilla-Silva, 2010; Cole, 2015; DiAngelo, 2012; Nzinga et al, 2018; Rowley & Camacho, 2015; Salter, Adams, & Perez, 2018).…”