Neuroscience
Several embarrassing scenes in the spoof fly-on-the-wall series The Office feature the calamitous manager David Brent trying so hard to appear racially colour blind that he actually ends up causing serious offence. A new study by Evan Apfelbaum and colleagues has identified the age when (White American) children first show this concern to appear unprejudiced, even though doing so leads them to perform less well at a task.
One hundred and one children, predominantly White, half of whom were aged 8 to 9, the other half being aged 9 to 10, participated in a task reminiscent of the board game "Guess Who?" Presented with photos of 40 individuals who varied according to four key dimensions, the children's task was to find out with as few yes/no questions as possible which one of those individuals' photos the researcher had in their hand.
Crucially, for half the children, race was one of the key dimensions. Among these children, the younger kids actually outperformed the older ones, and they did so because they were unafraid to ask questions about race. For the other half of the children, coloured stickers replaced race as the fourth identifying dimension, and in this case, as you'd expect, the older children outperformed the younger ones.
"The anomaly in task performance demonstrated in the present study may point to the onset of an important transition in human social development at 10 years of age," the researchers said, "when internalised social and moral norms begin to regulate behaviour, even when such regulation comes at a cost."
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Evan P. Apfelbaum, Kristin Pauker, Nalini Ambady, Samuel R. Sommers, Michael I. Norton (2008). Learning (not) to talk about race: When older children underperform in social categorization. Developmental Psychology, 44 (5), 1513-1518 DOI: 10.1037/a0012835
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
The age when children begin attempting to appear racially colour-blind
Several embarrassing scenes in the spoof fly-on-the-wall series The Office feature the calamitous manager David Brent trying so hard to appear racially colour blind that he actually ends up causing serious offence. A new study by Evan Apfelbaum and colleagues has identified the age when (White American) children first show this concern to appear unprejudiced, even though doing so leads them to perform less well at a task.One hundred and one children, predominantly White, half of whom were aged 8 to 9, the other half being aged 9 to 10, participated in a task reminiscent of the board game "Guess Who?" Presented with photos of 40 individuals who varied according to four key dimensions, the children's task was to find out with as few yes/no questions as possible which one of those individuals' photos the researcher had in their hand.
Crucially, for half the children, race was one of the key dimensions. Among these children, the younger kids actually outperformed the older ones, and they did so because they were unafraid to ask questions about race. For the other half of the children, coloured stickers replaced race as the fourth identifying dimension, and in this case, as you'd expect, the older children outperformed the younger ones.
"The anomaly in task performance demonstrated in the present study may point to the onset of an important transition in human social development at 10 years of age," the researchers said, "when internalised social and moral norms begin to regulate behaviour, even when such regulation comes at a cost."
_________________________________
Evan P. Apfelbaum, Kristin Pauker, Nalini Ambady, Samuel R. Sommers, Michael I. Norton (2008). Learning (not) to talk about race: When older children underperform in social categorization. Developmental Psychology, 44 (5), 1513-1518 DOI: 10.1037/a0012835Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Link to related Digest item: "How wishing to appear racially colour-blind can backfire".
Link to related Digest item: Do children acquire racism from their mothers?
Link to related Digest item: How ambiguous racism can be more harmful than the blatant variety.
Link to related Digest item: Do children acquire racism from their mothers?
Link to related Digest item: How ambiguous racism can be more harmful than the blatant variety.
- Young Children Don't Categorise Mixed-race People The Same Way Adults Do
When it comes to race, people increasingly self-identify as belonging to several categories rather than one, reflecting our intermingled world – for example, some sources suggest one in ten British children now grow up in mixed-race households. Yet...
- Do Children Acquire Racism From Their Mothers?
Young children sometimes give the impression of being racially prejudiced - for example, by preferring to play with other children who have the same colour skin as them. To find out where these attitudes come from, Luigi Castelli and colleagues at the...
- How Ambiguous Racism Can Be More Harmful Than The Blatant Variety
Ambiguous racism is more detrimental to African American students’ performance on a mental task than is blatant racism, psychologists have shown. By contrast, the reverse is true for White students, for whom blatant racism is more distracting. Jessica...
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With their wide eyes and innocent hearts, you might think it's easy to tell when a child is lying. Oh no it isn't. Not according to Leif Stromwall and colleagues, who found adults were useless at detecting when children were lying. Thirty children...
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People tend to think children are gullible. Richard Dawkins wrote that “with so many mindbytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion…”....