weaselzippers
Via Daily Mail:
Thank You Zip and Daily Mail.Children as young as three months old have been found to have a bias towards women who are the same race as themselves.Now, a University of Delaware scientist has discovered a simple exercise that he claims can undo this unconscious racial biases in young children.Using the technique of measuring how much time the babies spend looking at pictures of faces, Paul Quinn has spent a decade studying how infants classify race and gender. […]In their latest study, published in July in the journal Developmental Science, Quinn and his collaborators in China used photos of African and Asian faces and morphed them together to create ambiguous images that looked equally African and Asian.Some of the faces had pleasant expressions, while others looked more severe.When researchers showed the images to four- to six-year-olds in China, the children identified the happy faces as Asian – the category they were used to seeing – and the angry faces as African, a group they rarely saw in daily life.The scientists’ wanted to see whether the children’s unconscious racial biases could be disrupted.They showed the youngsters five different African faces and gave each of the individuals a name, repeating the process until the children could identify each of the five faces by name.When the children then looked at the happy and angry ambiguous-race photos again, their bias in favour of their own racial group had dropped dramatically.
