Broadview Psychology

Broadview Psychology

Reducing Explicit Racial Bias in Children

By

By: Sharon Chan, M.Sc. (PhD candidate) 

Ask someone what colour shirt they are wearing and the answer comes with relative ease and with minimal discomfort. Yet ask for the description of a person and some will inevitably shy away from using colour to label skin tone, as salient of a descriptor as it might be, for fear of backlash. Pretending to be colour blind does not make us any less prejudiced, but rather perpetuates avoidance or even dismissiveness around the topic1. 

Understanding the development of racial bias, or more generally any kind of group bias starts in the womb. Children are born with an aptitude for implicit statistical learning2, meaning their brains are wired to detect perceptual similarities in their environment before they are even born. We know this for example, by the fact that infants show a familiarity preference for their mothers’ voices from the time they are born due to in utero exposure3. This ability also helps to explain the development of ingroup preference. For example, children living in racially homogenous environments learn to perceptually distinguish between own race faces very well, but not so with faces of less frequently encountered races. Over time in such environments, they simply have more interactions with their own group, experience more positive interactions, and naturally associate positivity with this group4. Interestingly however, research has shown that in the absence of threat or conflict young children show ingroup preference independent of outgroup dislike5 which develops separately and later6.

For the most part of our evolutionary history, the ability to detect statistical similarities and associate positive attributions to our own ingroup was adaptive both physically and to the psyche. It helped us recognize friend from foe, safety from danger, and to basically feel good about ourselves7. Yet herein lies the underpinnings of implicit bias, those unintentional, unconscious, or uncontrollable thoughts, evaluations, and emotions that are automatically activated in the presence of a stimulus8: race9, gender10, and language11 among many other examples. Implicit bias is ubiquitous. We are all prone to it.

So what is to be done in the way of changing such deeply ingrained biases? Implicit preferences develop over time and are often deeply rooted in our exposure experiences12. Short of changing people’s socialization processes at a large scale which is at best impractical (E.g., Try telling people where to live and who to be friends with!) and often highly improbable (E.g., Can we make racially homogenous cities and countries magically diverse overnight?) implicit bias is notoriously resistant to change as many experimental psychologists have sadly discovered13, 14, 15. There is a silver lining, however.

Explicit bias, or those deliberate, self-reported, or conscious thoughts and evaluations16 are attitudes that we do have personal control over. Explicit bias is malleable and can act as a direct gateway or buffer to actual behaviour because it is conscious. It can also be updated to reflect newly acquired information separately from change in implicit bias17. So how can we help children reduce their explicit racial bias, or bias about any group for that matter? 

Friendships help reduce explicit bias18 (and you didn’t need a PhD to know that) so if you are able to facilitate the development of friendships such that kids get positive exposure to minority groups, that’s excellent! Unfortunately, parents do not get to choose who their children ultimately befriend. Researchers have also looked at creating experiments with vicarious exposure. For example, if you are my friend, and I have a friend, Jane Doe, that is black for example, and you see how positively I interact with Jane Doe, that counts as a positive exposure to black-others that makes a positive impression on you. This effect has been demonstrated with refugee populations through storybooks for example19.

My own doctoral research20 looked at increasing exposure to positive counterstereotypes or more simply, positive black role models, not of the superhero genre, which is less likely to generalize but of the everyday sort – teachers, a soccer coach – through narratives. The findings showed that a brief exposure to black positive exemplars was effective in reducing prowhite bias in school aged children, a bias that was statistically significant at baseline in a multicultural Toronto sample. Concerningly, exposure to white positive exemplars led to offloading more undesirable items to a black recipient (don’t worry they weren’t real, but children did not know this), an act that some might constitute as microaggression. This result seems to beg the question, is there unintended harm in overlearning positive information about more preferred groups to the detriment of less preferred groups? 

In either case, the moral of the story is that information is an important part of the ongoing socialization process. Educators, parents, and information sources must be tactful. Research has shown there is actually something called a backfire effect where people dig their heels down and resist even harder when ideologies are imposed upon them21, ultimately leading to more divisiveness. 

The Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1971) would also tell us that people do not like feeling bad about themselves. Let’s say you’re [insert social category], and someone makes upsetting, disparaging comments about said group. This would understandably feel unpleasant for most people and we don’t want to inadvertently teach children to dislike or feel guilt about their own identity, as that is not helpful. What is helpful is increasing exposure to positive information about a marginalized or minority group. We can capitalize on the fact that children have a positive bias when it comes to selecting information22. For example, research shows that between choosing a book with white characters or black characters, children will more likely choose the story with white characters, but between choosing a book that portrays black characters negatively or positively, they will choose the positive story. 

In sum, parents, educators, media, and other gatekeepers of information can help reduce explicit bias by:

  • Having open conversations about bias and prejudice.
  • Facilitating positive exposures or vicarious exposures where possible.
  • Acknowledging that noticing perceptual differences is normal, and that developing implicit preferences is perhaps even inevitable, but…
  • Making explicit, mindful choices around our behaviours is what gate keeps thoughts from turning into hurtful words or actions and behaviours. 
  • Remember that exposures don’t have to be physical. Information is a powerful tool, and learning interesting, positive information that disconfirms harmful stereotypes can be helpful.
  • Capitalize on children’s positivity bias. Keep in mind they have a selection bias and will gravitate towards selective learning about preferred groups, so you may need to actively tailor their positive exposures to minority groups. Think of it as trying to counterbalance what often happens in society: they get disproportionate socialization exposures to implicit and explicit messages that preserve the status quo of preferred groups. At the same time, be mindful of imposing how they “should” think which can lead to backfire effects. 

References

  1. Goff, P. A., Jackson, M. C., Nichols, A. H., & Di Leone, B. A. L. (2013). Anything but race: Avoiding racial discourse to avoid hurting you or me. Psychology, 4(03), 335.
  2. Bulf, H., Johnson, S. P., & Valenza, E. (2011). Visual statistical learning in the newborn infant. Cognition, 121(1), 127-132.
  3. Lee, G. Y., & Kisilevsky, B. S. (2014). Fetuses respond to father’s voice but prefer mother’s voice after birth. Developmental psychobiology, 56(1), 1-11.
  4. Lee, K., Quinn, P. C., & Heyman, G. D. (2017). New perspectives on human development. 
  5. McGlothlin, H., & Killen, M. (2010). How social experience is related to children’s intergroup attitudes. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(4), 625-634.
  6. Buttelmann, D., & Böhm, R. (2014). The ontogeny of the motivation that underlies in-group bias. Psychological science, 25(4), 921-927.
  7. Tajfel, H., Billig, M. G., Bundy, R. P., & Flament, C. (1971). Social categorization and intergroup behaviour. European journal of social psychology, 1(2), 149-178.
  8. Gawronski, B., & De Houwer, J. (2014). Implicit measures in social and personality psychology.
  9. Kelly, D. J., Liu, S., Ge, L., Quinn, P. C., Slater, A. M., Lee, K., … & Pascalis, O. (2007). Cross-race preferences for same-race faces extend beyond the African versus Caucasian contrast in 3-month-old infants. Infancy, 11(1), 87-95.
  10. Shutts, K., Roben, C. K. P., & Spelke, E. S. (2013). Children’s use of social categories in thinking about people and social relationships. Journal of Cognition and Development, 14(1), 35-62.
  11. Lev-Ari, S., & Keysar, B. (2010). Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of experimental social psychology, 46(6), 1093-1096.
  12. Kelly, D. J., Quinn, P. C., Slater, A. M., Lee, K., Gibson, A., Smith, M., … & Pascalis, O. (2005). Three‐month‐olds, but not newborns, prefer own‐race faces. Developmental science, 8(6), F31-F36.
  13. Forscher, P. S., Lai, C. K., Axt, J. R., Ebersole, C. R., Herman, M., Devine, P. G., & Nosek, B. A. (2019). A meta-analysis of procedures to change implicit measures. Journal of personality and social psychology.
  14. Aboud, F. E., Tredoux, C., Tropp, L. R., Brown, C. S., Niens, U., & Noor, N. M. (2012). Interventions to reduce prejudice and enhance inclusion and respect for ethnic differences in early childhood: A systematic review. Developmental review, 32(4), 307-336.
  15. Lai, C. K., Skinner, A. L., Cooley, E., Murrar, S., Brauer, M., Devos, T., … & Simon, S. (2016). Reducing implicit racial preferences: II. Intervention effectiveness across time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(8), 1001.
  16. Gawronski, B., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2006). Associative and propositional processes in evaluation: an integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change. Psychological bulletin, 132(5), 692.
  17. Gregg, A. P., Seibt, B., & Banaji, M. R. (2006). Easier done than undone: asymmetry in the malleability of implicit preferences. Journal of personality and social psychology, 90(1), 1.
  18. Aboud, F., Mendelson, M., & Purdy, K. (2003). Cross-race peer relations and friendship quality. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 27(2), 165-173.
  19. Cameron, L., Rutland, A., Brown, R., & Douch, R. (2006). Changing children’s intergroup attitudes toward refugees: Testing different models of extended contact. Child development, 77(5), 1208-1219.
  20. Chan, S. (2019). Children’s Attitudinal and Behavioural Explicit Racial Bias and Its Reduction (Unpublished dissertation). Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. 
  21. Cook, J., Ecker, U., & Lewandowsky, S. (2015). Misinformation and how to correct it. Emerging trends in the social and behavioral sciences: An interdisciplinary, searchable, and linkable resource, 1-17.
  22. Over, H., Eggleston, A., Bell, J., & Dunham, Y. (2018). Young children seek out biased information about social groups. Developmental Science, 21(3), e12580

Image

Gracia, C. (2018). Children. UnSplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/-Ux5mdMJNEA.