We argue that race and sex categories are psychologically and phenotypically confounded, affecting social categorizations and their efficiency. Sex categorization of faces was facilitated when the race category shared facial phenotypes or stereotypes with the correct sex category (e.g., Asian women and Black men) but was impaired when the race category shared incompatible phenotypes or stereotypes with the correct sex category (e.g., Asian men and Black women). These patterns were evident in the disambiguation of androgynous faces (Study 1) and the efficiency of judgments (Studies 1, 2, 4, and 5). These patterns emerged due to common facial phenotypes for the categories Black and men (Studies 3 and 5) and due to shared stereotypes among the categories Black and men and the categories Asian and women (Studies 4 and 5). These findings challenge the notion that social categories are perceived independent of one another and show, instead, that race is gendered.

The authors explored the emergence and antecedents of racial stereotyping in 89 children ages 3-10 years. Children completed a number of matching and sorting tasks, including a measure designed to assess their knowledge and application of both positive and negative in-group and outgroup stereotypes. Results indicate that children start to apply stereotypes to the out-group starting around 6 years of age. Controlling for a number of factors, two predictors contributed significantly towards uniquely explaining the use of these stereotypes: race salience (i.e., seeing and organizing by race) and essentialist thinking (i.e., believing that race cannot change). These results provide insight into how and when real-world interventions aimed at altering the acquisition of racial stereotypes may be implemented. Keywords social development; racial stereotyping; essentialismYoung children possess a number of abilities that may serve as the foundation for learning racial knowledge. Three-month-old infants can discriminate perceptually between different racial groups (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006;Kelly et al., 2005), preferring to look at faces that belong to a familiar racial group. By 3-4 years of age, children can sort people by race (Aboud, 1988;Nesdale, 2001), and soon after, those in the ethnic majority group (e.g., European American children in the U.S.) show signs of implicit and explicit in-group preferences (Baron & Banaji, 2006;Cameron, Alvarez, Ruble & Fuligni, 2001;Nesdale, 2004). Recent work has explored several variables underlying biased group attitudes, such as the role of categorization (Bigler, Jones, & Lobliner, 1997;Patterson & Bigler, 2006) and status (Bigler, Brown, & Markell, 2001;Nesdale & Flesser, 2001). However, despite notable research exploring children's racial attitudes, relatively little work has investigated the emergence and antecedents of children's racial stereotyping.Much of past research exploring children's racial stereotyping has muddled the distinction between attitudes and stereotypes. Social psychologists have defined stereotypes as cognitive structures comprised of consensual knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about social groups that may result in both positive and negative associations for a single specific Address correspondence to Kristin Pauker, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Building 420, Jordan Hall, Stanford, CA 94305, kpauker@stanford.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptChild Dev. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2011 November 1. Published in final edited form as:Child Dev. 2010 ; 81(6): 1799-1813. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01511.x. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript group (Hamilton & Trolier, 1986). Stereotypes are thus distinct from racial attitudes, which reflect affective evaluations or preferences, where one group is consistently considered more positively and another more negatively. Measures conceived with the intent to measure stereotyping, such as "trait stereotyping," often measure a...

Exponential increases in multi-racial identities expected over the next century, creates a conundrum for perceivers accustomed to classifying people as “own” or “other” race. The current research examines how perceivers resolve this dilemma with regard to the “own-race bias.” We hypothesized that perceivers would not be motivated to include ambiguous-race individuals in the in-group and would therefore have some difficulty remembering them. Both racially-ambiguous and other-race faces were misremembered more often than own-race faces (Study 1), though memory for ambiguous faces was improved among perceivers motivated to include biracial individuals in the in-group (Study 2). Racial labels assigned to racially ambiguous faces determined memory for these faces, suggesting that uncertainty provides the motivational context for discounting ambiguous faces in memory (Study 3). Finally, an inclusion motivation fostered cognitive associations between racially-ambiguous faces and the in-group. Moreover, the extent to which perceivers associated racially-ambiguous faces with the in-group predicted memory for ambiguous faces and accounted for the impact of motivation on memory (Study 4). Thus, memory for biracial individuals seems to involve a flexible person construal process shaped by motivational factors.

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/095679761038474

As compared to more explicit racial slurs and sexist statements, biased facial expressions and body language may resist conscious identification and thus produce a hidden social influence. In four studies we show that race biases can be subtly transmitted via televised nonverbal behavior. Characters on 11 popular television shows exhibited more negative nonverbal behavior toward black than toward status-matched white characters. Critically, exposure to pro-white (vs. pro-black) nonverbal bias increased viewers’ bias even though patterns of nonverbal behavior could not be consciously reported. These findings suggest that hidden patterns of televised nonverbal behavior influence bias among viewers.