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Babies who aren't old enough to walk or talk still manage to exhibit racial bias, according to a new study. The research found that infants prefer to learn from adults who share their skin color.
As part of the study, researchers from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and the University of Toronto - along with collaborators from the US, UK, France and China - gave infants a series of videos to watch.
In each video, a female adult looked at one of the four corners of the screen. In some videos, an animal image appeared in the direction she had looked. In other films, an animal image appeared at a non-looked at location.
The results showed that the infants followed the gaze of members of their own race more than they followed the gaze of members of other races.
"This occurred when the faces were slightly unreliable, as they are in the natural environment..." a press release from the University of Toronto
states. "This result suggests that, under uncertainty, infants are biased to learn information from own-race adults as opposed to other-race adults."
Infants under the age of six months were not found to show such bias, according to the study, which was
published in the journal
Child Development on Monday.
The findings follow a separate study which was conducted by the same researchers and
published in the journal
Developmental Science in January.
In that study, the researchers played a sequence of videos for three- to 10-month infants. The films depicted female adults with a neutral facial expression.
Before viewing each face, infants heard a music clip. They then participated in one of four music-face combinations: happy music followed by own-race faces; sad music followed by own-race faces; happy music followed by other-race faces; and sad music followed by other-race faces.
The research found that infants aged six- to nine-months looked longer at own-race faces when paired with happy music as opposed to sad music. They looked longer at other-race faces when paired with sad music compared to with happy music.
"Results showed that after six months of age, infants begin to associate own-race faces with happy music and other-race faces with sad music," the press release states.
As with the first study, infants under the age of six months were not found to have the same bias.
Dr. Kang Lee, a professor at OISE's Jackman Institute of Child Study and the lead author of both pieces of research, said the findings of both studies are "significant for many reasons."
"The results show that race-based bias already exists around the second half of a child's first year. This challenges the popular view that race-based bias first emerges only during the preschool years," he said.
Meanwhile, Dr. Naiqi (Gabriel) Xiao, first author of the two papers and a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University,
said the findings are notable because they contradict the belief that racial bias is associated with negative experiences a person may have had with other-race individuals. In other words, the children in the study were simply too young to have memories of such experiences.
Pointing to previous studies which indicate that many babies typically experience 90 percent of own-race faces, Lee said that racial interactions during infancy may influence our perceptions about race in adulthood.
"These findings thus point to the possibility that aspects of racial bias later in life may arise from our lack of exposure to other-race individuals in infancy," he said.
Lee concluded that it is important to identify the starting point of racial bias in order to find ways of preventing it.
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It's rare but does bring into question, how are facial and racial characteristics recognized and also the question of what we accept as human behavior or even animal behavior for that matter.
Maybe it's just a recognition of one animal species showing empathy for another species, that is young, immature and needs help assistance and communal bonding.
What poseurs seldom notice is that, in this life, people who know anything worth knowing tend to travel in unmarked cars.
My partner has a very impressive beard, long curly hair and wears a hat. ("oooh, youm got 'andsome hair me boody, us is proper jealous"... say the elderly Devonian ladies to him in the shops!). Tiny babies don't cry when he looks at them, some toddlers do, older children think he's a woman if they are standing behind him and most dogs bark at him initially. When he removes the hat, the dogs stop barking and the toddlers calm down. This happens quite a lot, it's not a deliberate experiment, but we clock the results mentally and have discovered that dogs and toddlers don't like strangers in hats. May we have our funding now please?
But it was short lived, in high school I had much better teachers who saw the division of working class US vs ruling class Power.
That's why all of this racism gets focus and amplification, to divide us of common working class backgrounds. That's also why MLK and Malcolm X were killed as they started to see it wasn't about color but class.
You are dead on point.
My experiences were the exact opposite of yours, though.
I went to a nice elementary school through 6th grade. Our whole school wrote to soldiers in Vietnam. I was one of two who received a reply. (Perhaps because my father had been in the Air Force in Korea (I still have his cold weather, woolen, ear flaps head gear from the two years he spent there.) What he learned there put him on the road to rocketry, and we moved from California to Cocoa with the space program. I always felt that we likely had it better than 99 % of even the first world, and it's a shame to witness the sad police state it has become.
When I went off to Jr. High, 7th & 8th grade - that was when I first felt the hate of race. Girls mature quicker, and I remember in one of my first weeks there, being glad I got on the bus early, as two black girls were fighting and real blood was really flying. Earrings ripped out, faces scarred to this day, I'm sure.
But the real hell was yet to come. Four years of race riots at Cocoa High. A true war zone - and even then - it always felt to me that the problems were instigated from outside the school. Though I almost got killed (literally) on my first day of school, I eventually and quickly ran track, and there were only two white guys on the bus. Thus I learned to like Marvin Gaye, et al., though our love of The Who, Stones, Zep, et al. was always there. Same saved me from being cornered and attacked by packs of angry black guys. We had riot police in the halls for the first and last month of the school year.
And you know what? I loved our 'surfer culture' as it was real, it wasn't learned from some MSM bs; it arose spontaneously.
Likewise, I love black culture and talk down with the homeboys as if I were black with no problems, mon.
I likewise can speak southern redneck when needed required.
But at our ten year reunion: we had three black guys on death row, one of whom had already been put down. The danger of the last we all knew well and he hated me not for 'white privilege' but simply because I was white. (I remember he snuck up on a friend from behind and hit him with a lead pipe. (Honorable fights at my school NEVER involved weapons.) He was suspended for three days, and back at school before my friend finally came out of his coma.
You know what that friend does now? Defends death row inmates.
Cocoa and Brevard with a California start in the desert at Edwards in the Mojave, etc. I wouldn't trade it for the world.
R.C.
I know this for a fact from personal experience. Everytime I sunbatthe my skin changes colour tan To hues of golden brown. As I get older the tans lasts longer and the skin feels tougher. After many generations of experiencing a similar environment, I believe your DNA remembers.
This study is a ridiculous. Babies respond to whoever they feel the most secure with and closest to.
I'm sure you could conduct a super expensive study across multiple continents to find that infants are biased towards their parents amongst a population group of adults. However, do these infants grow up to hate other adults who aren't their parents? NO.
So to rewind, racism is not natural, it is taught.
The problem you have when discussing racism is that 'in general' the main 2 groups in this debate hold extreme views... imo.
White people think it simply doesn't exist. Black people think it's under every rock.
Can you blame black people for being so paranoid though? Given history and the current system - look at police brutality or poverty levels or the prison industrial complex.... look at neoliberal economics.
People pointing to issues of race is not so different to people pointing to issues of economics or advocating for change. Is it not true that most people who read sott for example want change in the world? Why? Maybe you are just paranoid freaks seeing things that don't exist. So why any different if people say... hey look here, we need some changes because we think things are somewhat racist by design in a,b,c issues e.g. police brutality or incarceration rates etc.
Think about it.