This research used an Implicit Racial Bias Test to investigate implicit racial biases among 3- to 5-year-olds and adult participants in China (N = 213) and Cameroon (N = 257). In both cultures, participants displayed high levels of racial biases that remained stable between 3 and 5 years of age. Unlike adults, young children's implicit racial biases were unaffected by the social status of the other-race groups. Also, unlike adults, young children displayed overt explicit racial biases, and these biases were dissociated from their implicit biases. The results provide strong evidence for the early emergence of implicit racial biases and point to the need to reduce them in early childhood.

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The present study examined whether having a positive reputation to maintain makes young children less likely to cheat. Cheating was assessed through a temptation resistance paradigm in which participants were instructed not to cheat in a guessing game. Across three studies (total N = 361), preschool-aged participants were randomly assigned to either a reputation condition, in which an experimenter told them that she had learned of their positive reputation from classmates, or to a control condition in which they received no such information. By age 5, children in the reputation condition cheated less often than those in the control condition even though nobody was watching and choosing not to cheat conflicted with their personal interest. These findings are the first to show that informing children that they have a positive reputation to maintain can influence their moral behavior.

Two studies with preschool-age children examined the effectiveness of perceptual individuation training at reducing racial bias (Study 1, N = 32; Study 2, N = 56). We found that training preschool-age children to individuate other-race faces resulted in a reduction in implicit racial bias while mere exposure to other-race faces produced no such effect. We also showed that neither individuation training nor mere exposure reduced explicit racial bias. Theoretically, our findings provide strong evidence for a causal link between individual-level face processing and implicit racial bias, and are consistent with the newly proposed Perceptual-Social Linkage Hypothesis. Practically, our findings suggest that offering children experiences that allow them to increase their expertise in processing individual other-race faces will help reduce their implicit racial bias.