Children’s essentialist reasoning about language and race

Abstract

Across four studies, we directly compared children's essentialist reasoning about the stability of race and language throughout an individual's lifespan. Monolingual English-speaking children were presented with a series of images of children who were either White or Black; each face was paired with a voice clip in either English or French. Participants were asked which of two adults each target child would grow up to be - one who was a 'match' to the target child in race but not language, and the other a 'match' in language but not race. Nine- to 10-year-old European American children chose the race-match, rather than the language-match. In contrast, 5-6-year-old European American children in both urban, racially diverse, and rural, racially homogeneous environments chose the language-match, even though this necessarily meant that the target child would transform racial categories. Although surprising in light of adult reasoning, these young children demonstrated an intuition about the relative stability of an individual's language compared to her racial group membership. Yet, 5-6-year-old African American children, similar to the older European American children, chose the race-match, suggesting that membership in a racial minority group may highlight children's reasoning about race as a stable category. Theoretical implications for our understanding of children's categorization of human kinds are discussed.

Essentialism and Racial Bias Jointly Contribute to the Categorization of Multiracial Individuals

“…Since racial essentialism develops with age (Kinzler & Dautel, 2012), it is no surprise that adults but not children endorse hypodescent when categorizing multiracial individuals (Roberts & Gelman, in press). Additional work is needed to uncover when in development racial essentialism emerges and interacts with racial biases to produce hypodescent.…”

Young children's automatic encoding of social categories

“…However, the present findings are in accordance with mounting evidence that gender is a more meaningful social distinction than race early in development (see Kinzler, Shutts, & Correll, 2010, and Shutts, 2013, for review). For example, infants, toddlers, and preschoolers are more likely to accept objects that are offered or endorsed by same- over other-gender individuals, but are equally likely to accept objects associated with same- and other-race individuals (Frazier et al, 2012; Kinzler & Spelke, 2011; Shutts, Banaji, & Spelke, 2010); young children treat gender, but not race, as a natural and stable category (Kinzler & Dautel, 2012; Rhodes & Gelman, 2009); and gender serves as a more robust guide to children’s friendship decisions in the preschool years than does race (Shutts, Roben, & Spelke, 2013). Further, when asked to infer an ad hoc categorization scheme (e.g., why an experimenter is putting stickers on some photographs but not others), children between three and eight years of age are more successful when categorization involves gender rather than race (McGraw, Durm, & Durnam, 1989; Mcgraw, Durm, & Patterson, 1983).…”

Multiracial Children’s and Adults’ Categorizations of Multiracial Individuals

“…The images used in this study were drawn from the Radboud Faces Database (Langner et al, 2010), Child Affective Facial Expression Set (CAFE; Lobue & Thrasher, 2014), Kinzler and Dautel (2012), and online sources. The full CAFE set can be obtained at databrary.org.…”