THE ORIGINS OF RACIAL PREJUDICE
I saw some snot-nosed kid on the Internet today with a placard which read “The UK invented racism”. How could someone wearing a baseball cap back to front possibly be wrong? I asked myself. It turns out that racial bias is a natural phenomenon, developing in infancy, and that scientists have been reporting on it for decades. Obviously it’s a narrative not favoured by those with a political bias, or whose views are entrenched in identity politics. But here’s what I found out:
“In China, young children don’t even know about race because that’s not a very common concept that parents or teachers discuss with them. But even without any knowledge about race, they still have bias …” Link
Own Race Bias
Humans aren’t born with racial bias, but they’re well on the way by the age of three months. They don’t get that from their parents either. Three months is the age at which they are able to discriminate between faces from different ethic groups, white, black, Asian etc. Pretty soon they are associating positive things with the face that’s bringing them up. So if a child is brought up by a French speaking white mother, the child develops a positive bias towards French, white and women. Repeated studies on children not only confirm this, but also show that this ‘bias’ is a bias for something, not a bias against something. By the time they are 5-8 years old they have “automatic in-group positivity”. By the time they are adults, Own Race Bias is fully established. All races have it.
It is pronounced across race groups. In one test “(Malaysian–Malay, Malaysian–Chinese, Malaysian–Indian, and Western–Caucasian) when faces were presented with only internal features, implying that growing up in a profoundly multiracial society does not necessarily eliminate ORB.”
The In-Group
This seemingly universal bias leads to the creation of “In-Groups”. In sociology and social psychology, an in-group is a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. People may for example identify with their peer group, family, community, sports team, political party, gender, religion, or nation. It has been argued that characteristics such as gender and ethnicity are inflexible or even essential features of such system. With in-group advantage, people evaluate and judge members of their own self-defined group as being better and fairer than members of other groups. That’s where the trouble begins.
The Cross Race Effect
If the in-group-building factor is a person’s race, then cross-race effect appears. The favouritism of in-group members also results from the decreased inborn motivation to read the face of a person of another group or culture. An experiment in 1996 showed that the motivation to decode the emotional facial expression instantly decreased when the experimental subject realized that the face belonged to a person of another race. Although most studies done about the cross race effect are with black and white participants, there are also numerous studies done with people of different ethnic backgrounds.
For example, there are studies done that compare Hispanic with black and white participants, black with white and Japanese participants, Chinese with Korean and white participants, Chinese with Indian and other East Asian ethnic participants, Turkish and German participants, and finally a study has been done comparing Arab and Israeli Jews. The data from all of these studies have come to the same conclusion. The cross-race effect is evident among all people of all different races.
Conclusion
When you combine the positive bias of the “In-Group” with the negative bias of the “Cross Race Effect, you have racial prejudice. In societies it becomes part of culture, and becomes entrenched in that culture. It’s common to all races, starts in infancy, and it’s something which has to be un-learned when children are young. Perhaps then, instead of teaching 6 year old schoolboys about masturbation, we could educate them instead.
In response to racism we seem to be trying to fix the blame, instead of fixing the problem. Blame history, blame slavery, blame statues, blame imperialism, blame capitalism, blame white people etc.
The Research
People often recognize and remember faces of individuals within their own race more easily than those of other races. While behavioral research has long suggested that the Other-Race Effect (ORE) is due to extensive experience with one’s own race group, the neural mechanisms underlying the effect have remained elusive.
The Other-Race Effect (ORE) is the tendency to recognize and remember faces of one’s own race more readily than those of other races. The concept of the ORE was first documented over one century ago in an early study of environmental influence on visual discrimination1. In the decades since, the ORE has become one of the most replicated phenomena in face perception2, reproduced across testing paradigms including face recognition and eyewitness lineups regardless of the race and nationality of participants.
While this effect may manifest innocuously, it poses serious consequences. Eyewitness misidentification is the largest contributing factor in wrongful convictions overturned by DNA evidence, and 41% of these cases involved cross-race identifications4. Experimentally, the ORE manifests in high rates of false recognition for other-race (OR) faces, which likely contributes to the high incidence of mistaken cross-race convictions5. Considering these implications, there is an imperative to understand the basis of the ORE, such that it can be minimized or eliminated.
Numerous theories have been proposed to account for the ORE. The ‘race contact’ and ‘perceptual expertise’ hypotheses assert that quantity and quality of interaction with a specific race group effects how well faces of that race are recognized. Due to shared experience, racial bias, and segregated communities6,7, people tend to interact mostly within their own race8,9. It is posited that qualitatively different processing styles emerge early in perceptual processing as a function of this relative experience, where same-race (SR) faces are processed in a configural manner, while OR faces are processed in a feature-based manner2. In this context, configural processing is defined as extracting the relations between facial features (such as eyes, mouth, nose) of a SR face, allowing it to be encoded as a unified object rather than a set of features10–14. Behaviorally, this allows for more fine-tuned discriminations between similar SR faces, improving overall recognition for one’s own race. In contrast, OR faces are processed featurally with individual components isolated from one another, conferring no recognition benefit8,14–19.
Often omitted from discussion of perceptual processing differences for SR and OR faces are the potential contributions of attention to the ORE. ‘Social-categorization’ theories argue instead that differential attentional allocation to SR and OR faces at encoding is the primary progenitor of the ORE. Specifically, it is suggested that SR faces are more deeply attended to and individuated, while OR faces are processed in a shallower manner due to cognitive labeling as ‘out-group’, or other20–23. These attentional differences at encoding are therefore believed to be the major contributors to the ORE in subsequent memory.
Several models attempt to integrate the roles of perceptual expertise and social-categorization in generating the ORE. The ingroup/outgroup model suggests social categories can elicit differential encoding of SR and OR faces through recruitment of configural processing mechanisms24. The categorization-individuation model proposes social-categorization as well as experience discriminating SR and OR faces work in tandem to drive selective attention during face encoding, giving rise to and modulating the ORE.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6920375/
3 months
A visual preference procedure was used to examine preferences among faces of different ethnicities (African, Asian, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern) in Chinese 3-month-old infants exposed only to Chinese faces. The infants demonstrated a preference for faces from their own ethnic group. Alongside previous results showing that Caucasian infants exposed only to Caucasian faces prefer same-race faces (Kelly et al., 2005) and that Caucasian and African infants exposed only to native faces prefer the same over the other-race faces (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006), the findings reported here (a) extend the same-race preference observed in young infants to a new race of infants (Chinese), and (b) show that cross-race preferences for same-race faces extend beyond the perceptually robust contrast between African and Caucasian faces.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18974853/
Adults are sensitive to the physical differences that define ethnic groups. However, the age at which we become sensitive to ethnic differences is currently unclear. Our study aimed to clarify this by testing newborns and young infants for sensitivity to ethnicity using a visual preference (VP) paradigm. While newborn infants demonstrated no spontaneous preference for faces from either their own- or other-ethnic groups, 3-month-old infants demonstrated a significant preference for faces from their own-ethnic group. These results suggest that preferential selectivity based on ethnic differences is not present in the first days of life, but is learned within the first 3 months of life. The findings imply that adults’ perceptions of ethnic differences are learned and derived from differences in exposure to own- versus other-race faces during early development.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16246233/
3 – 6 months
In what soon became the world’s most liked tweet, former president Barack Obama this week responded to a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia by posting a famous quote from South African leader Nelson Mandela. “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion,” reads the quote, which is pulled from Mandela’s 1994 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.
Two subsequent tweets then finish the quote, “people must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” The quote is a nice sentiment, but it doesn’t quite line up with science. According to a growing body of infant research, racism is often a default setting for babies. Tolerance, not racism, is what needs to be hammered into young minds.
“Parents do not teach children to be biased,” said Kang Lee, a human development researcher at the University of Toronto. Lee said that while a racist parent can exploit a child’s innate biases, most children will organically begin to dismiss other races soon after their birth.
Mandela was correct in that no baby is born with inherent prejudices. But at around six months, the average infant will automatically begin to distrust anything that looks and sounds different than their parents. “Because most of us are born into monoracial environments we start to show preferences for own-race individuals, and then we start to show biases,” he said.
The baby begins to associate positive things, such as happy music, with their own race. Sad music gets associated with other races. Foreign languages and accents, meanwhile, sound scary and unfamiliar. “If they hear English, they prefer English — they don’t like people who speak French,” said Lee.
Much of Lee’s research has focused on tracking the eye movements of young children to gauge their racial preference. A June study exposed infants to images of ethnically diverse faces, and discovered that the babies spent most of their time looking at the faces that most resembled their parents. “Caucasian infants look longer at Caucasian faces than at other-race ones,” it read, adding “when the same Caucasian and Asian faces are shown to Asian three-month-olds … they look more at the Asian faces.”
Documented in numerous other studies around the world, it’s been called the Other Race Effect, the inability of infants to distinguish the faces of ethnicities they aren’t used to
We assessed 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old Caucasian infants’ ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group and within three other-race groups (African, Middle Eastern, and Chinese).
The 3-month-old infants demonstrated recognition in all conditions, the 6-month-old infants were able to recognize Caucasian and Chinese faces only, and the 9-month-old infants’ recognition was restricted to own-race faces.
The pattern of preferences indicates that the other-race effect is emerging by 6 months of age and is present at 9 months of age. The findings suggest that facial input from the infant’s visual environment is crucial for shaping the face-processing system early in infancy, resulting in differential recognition accuracy for faces of different races in adulthood.
Recent findings regarding spontaneous preference have confirmed the impact of differential face input on the tuning of the face prototype during early infancy. It has been demonstrated that selectivity based on ethnic facial differences emerges very early in life, with 3-month-old infants preferring to look at faces from their own group, as opposed to faces from other ethnic groups. We have shown that this preference is not present at birth, which strongly suggests that own-group preferences result from differential exposure to faces from one’s particular ethnic group. In addition, Bar-Haim et al. (2006) tested a population of Ethiopian infants who had been raised in an absorption center while their families awaited housing in Israel. These infants were frequently exposed to both Ethiopian and Israeli adults and subsequently demonstrated no preference for either African or Caucasian faces when presented simultaneously.
Collectively, these results provide strong evidence that faces observed in the visual environment have a highly influential role in eliciting face preferences during infancy. Additional evidence supporting this conclusion comes from a study concerning gender preference (Quinn, Yahr, Kuhn, Slater, & Pascalis, 2002), which showed that 3- to 4-month-old infants raised primarily by a female caregiver demonstrate a visual preference for female over male faces, whereas infants raised primarily by a male caregiver prefer to look at male rather than female faces.
9-12 yrs
The goal of this research was to examine children’s implicit racial attitudes. Across three studies, a total of 359 White 5‐ to 12‐year‐olds completed child‐friendly exemplar (Affective Priming Task; Affect Misattribution Procedure) and category‐based (Implicit Association Test) implicit measures of racial attitudes. Younger children (5‐ to 8‐year‐olds) showed automatic ingroup positivity toward White child exemplars, whereas older children (9‐ to 12‐year‐olds) did not. Children also showed no evidence of automatic negativity toward Black exemplars, despite demonstrating consistent pro‐White versus Black bias on the category‐based measure. Together, the results suggest that (a) implicit ingroup and outgroup attitudes can follow distinct developmental trajectories, and (b) the spontaneous activation of implicit intergroup attitudes can depend on the salience of race.
https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cdev.12991
A 2020 study of adults
The own-race bias (ORB) is a reliable phenomenon across cultural and racial groups where unfamiliar faces from other races are usually remembered more poorly than own-race faces (Meissner and Brigham, 2001). By adopting a yes–no recognition paradigm, we found that ORB was pronounced across race groups (Malaysian–Malay, Malaysian–Chinese, Malaysian–Indian, and Western–Caucasian) when faces were presented with only internal features (Experiment 1), implying that growing up in a profoundly multiracial society does not necessarily eliminate ORB. Using a procedure identical to Experiment 1, we observed a significantly greater increment in recognition performance for other-race faces than for own-race faces when the external features (e.g. facial contour and hairline) were presented along with the internal features (Experiment 2)—this abolished ORB. Contrary to assumptions based on the contact hypothesis, participants’ self-reported amount of interracial contact on a social contact questionnaire did not significantly predict the magnitude of ORB. Overall, our findings suggest that the level of exposure to other-race faces accounts for only a small part of ORB. In addition, the present results also support the notion that different neural mechanisms may be involved in processing own- and other-race faces, with internal features of own-race faces being processed more effectively, whereas external features dominate representations of other-race faces.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7067904/
The Cross Race Effect
Ingroup advantage – Cross-race effect has a strong connection with the ingroup advantage phenomenon. With ingroup advantage, people evaluate and judge members of their own self-defined group as being better and fairer than members of other groups (outgroup disadvantage).
Social psychologists have demonstrated in the last 30 years that even the smallest aspect of differentiation, like preference for flavor of ice cream or style of music, can trigger in group advantage. If the group-building factor is a person’s race, then cross-race effect appears. The favoritism of in group members also results from the decreased inborn motivation to read the face of a person of another group or culture.
Hess, Senecal & Kirouac showed in 1996 that the motivation to decode the emotional facial expression instantly decreased when the experimental subject realized that the face belonged to a person of another race.
Although most studies done about the cross race effect are with black and white participants, there are also numerous studies done with people of different ethnic backgrounds. For example, there are studies done that compare Hispanic with black and white participants, black with white and Japanese participants, Chinese with Korean and white participants, Chinese with Indian and other East Asian ethnic participants, Turkish and German participants, and finally a study has been done comparing Arab and Israeli Jews. The data from all of these studies have come to the same conclusion. The cross-race effect is evident among all people of all different races
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect#Ingroup_advantage
In-Groups
In sociology and social psychology, an in-group is a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. By contrast, an out-group is a social group with which an individual does not identify. People may for example identify with their peer group, family, community, sports team, political party, gender, religion, or nation. It has been found that the psychological membership of social groups and categories is associated with a wide variety of phenomena.
In evolutionary psychology, in-group favoritism is seen as an evolved mechanism selected for the advantages of coalition affiliation. It has been argued that characteristics such as gender and ethnicity are inflexible or even essential features of such system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_and_out-group
