Report Reducing Racial Bias in Children

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We tend to see people we’re biased against as all the same. They are “those people.” Instead of thinking of them as specific individuals, we lump them into a group. Now an international team of researchers suggests that one way to reduce racial bias in young children is by teaching them to distinguish among faces of a different race.

The study, published in the journal Child Development, is the first to show a lasting effect – and in kids young enough to not be too set in their ways.

It is co-authored by researchers from the University of California San Diego, the University of Toronto, the University of Delaware, l’Université Grenoble Alpes in France, and Hangzhou Normal University and Zhejiang Normal University in China.

Two 20-minute sessions with 4- to 6-year-old Chinese children, in which they were trained to identify black male faces as individuals, reduced implicit bias in the children for at least two months.

Key to reducing the bias? The repeat session.

“A single session had minimal immediate effects that dissipated quickly. The lesson didn’t stick. But a second session a week later seemed to act like a booster shot, producing measurable differences in implicit bias 60 days later,” said Gail Heyman, a professor of psychology in the UC San Diego Division of Social Sciences and a senior co-author on the study.

Kang Lee, of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and also a senior co-author, said, “We know from other research that preferences for your own race develop in early childhood. Our method has the advantage of being suitable for very young children, and it also improves children’s ability to recognize faces, which is an important social skill in and of itself.”


Read more here. (University of California, San Diego)
 
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