Racial Categorization Predicts Implicit Racial Bias in Preschool Children

Peipei Setoh, Kristy J. J. Lee, Lijun Zhang, Miao K. Qian, Paul C. Quinn, Gail D. Heyman, Kang Lee

First published: 12 June 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12851 Citations: 5

[This article was updated on January 25, 2019 after first online publication on June 12, 2017: Funding information was updated.] This research was supported by grants from the Singapore Ministry of Education Social Science Research Thematic Grant (MOE2016-SSTRG-017), Nanyang Technological University (M4081490100), and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01 HD-46526). We are grateful to NTUC First Campus My First Skool and KidsSTOP at Science Centre Singapore for their support, and to the families and children who participated.

Abstract

This research investigated the relation between racial categorization and implicit racial bias in majority and minority children. Chinese and Indian 3- to 7-year-olds from Singapore (N = 158) categorized Chinese and Indian faces by race and had their implicit and explicit racial biases measured. Majority Chinese children, but not minority Indian children, showed implicit bias favoring own race. Regardless of ethnicity, children's racial categorization performance correlated positively with implicit racial bias. Also, Chinese children, but not Indian children, displayed explicit bias favoring own race. Furthermore, children's explicit bias was unrelated to racial categorization performance and implicit bias. The findings support a perceptual–social linkage in the emergence of implicit racial bias and have implications for designing programs to promote interracial harmony.

Implicit racial bias has broad personal and societal consequences in all spheres of human life including education, politics, healthcare, employment, justice, finance, and even dating (e.g., Chugh, 2004). Because this negative bias is firmly entrenched and difficult to change by adulthood, it is crucial to understand its emergence in early childhood so as to develop prevention and intervention strategies that can be used early in life.

A framework for thinking about the ontogenetic emergence of implicit racial bias is the perceptual–social linkage hypothesis (Lee, Quinn, & Heyman, 2017). This hypothesis proposes that implicit bias in early childhood results from two early tendencies: the tendency to categorize and the tendency to form relatively more positive associations with familiar categories. In the present research, we test one central prediction derived from this hypothesis: that young children's tendency to categorize faces by race is predictive of their level of implicit racial bias.

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