SBP: Developmental mechanisms underlying the emergence of racial bias

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This project will provide new insights into how racial biases emerge and develop in early childhood. Racism remains a pervasive force with widespread and well-documented harmful consequences. An important step towards redressing these problems is understanding the psychological processes that maintain and reinforce them. Young children begin to develop harmful and problematic beliefs about race in early childhood (often by 3 years of age), and a majority of children and adolescents of color report experiencing racially-based discrimination. Yet, some children develop stronger racial biases than others, suggesting that the persistence of racial bias is not inevitable. This project will reveal how racial biases emerge and develop in children living across the United States and will examine how parent-child conversations might lead children to form harmful beliefs about race (or serve to prevent them). In doing so, this project will address fundamental questions about how racial biases take root in early childhood and will identify ways that parents can prevent this development. By partnering with several community organizations to implement this project and using an innovative, webcam-based lab for remote developmental research, this project will maximize the opportunities for this research to lead to rapid changes in parenting practices with the potential to reduce the emergence of racial bias in early childhood. The first part of this project will explore the foundational beliefs that predict the emergence and development of racial bias in children across the United States via a longitudinal study with 300 children and parents who will participate in this research from home using an online lab. This project will examine how children’s emerging beliefs about interracial friendships and racial inequalities predict the future development of racial biases. Specifically, every six months over a three year period, children will complete a series of assessments that gauge their racial biases (e.g., how much they like and want to play with Black and White children), their beliefs about interracial friendships (who their parents would want them to play with, who their friends would want to play with), and whether they believe that racial inequalities are due to essentialist (e.g., inherent/intrinsic differences between racial groups) or structural (e.g., differential access to resources and opportunities) factors. This study will test the hypotheses that children who hold more exclusive beliefs about interracial friendships and more essentialist beliefs about racial inequalities will develop higher levels of racial biases. The second part of this project will explore an important developmental mechanism by which children develop problematic beliefs about interracial friendships and racial inequalities: parent-child conversations. Using our online lab, 105 children and parents will complete a series of role-playing activities designed to spur conversations about racial inequalities; conversations will be coded for subtle linguistic cues that imply that racial and socioeconomic groups reflect inherently different types of people, as well as for essentialist and structural explanations for racial disparities. These features of parent-child conversations will then be used to predict children’s racial biases and foundational beliefs as in Part A. Thus, this project will advance our understanding of how racial biases emerge and develop in early childhood. By identifying the core features of parent-child conversations that can foster or impede these beliefs, this project will also inform future interventions aimed at reducing the development of racial bias. By disseminating the results of this research via our online lab, we will enable easy access to our findings for researchers, parents, educators, and policy makers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.