By: Matthew A. Timmins
Background: In a 2009 blog (click here to read), the authors discuss how families differ in their willingness to and how they approach skin color with their children. It seems children recognize different races and genders as early as infancy, rather than when society explicitly separates races. The idea of being raised in a “color-blind” mentality (e.g., don’t think about skin color, treat all people the same) may sound pleasant, but neglects a person’s family history (click here to read a blog about how this applies to parenting) and can be detrimental to relationships between groups (e.g., Neville, Poteat, Lewis, & Spanierman, 2014). While the former blog suggests that children are able to categorize, and potentially discriminate against, others at a very young age, it does not address whether this is learned behavior or biologically designed.
One way to examine prejudice thoughts without examining knowledge (i.e., learned information) is through the Implicit-Associations Task (IAT). In general, this task measures how quickly participants are able to categorize and identify words (e.g., “intelligent,” “poor,” “mathematics”) after being exposed to priming stimuli (e.g., people of different races). This works on the assumption that the priming stimulus is presented to quickly for the participant to become aware of any bias. Based on a neuroimaging study, the longer it takes to identify words (e.g. “light”) that are incongruent with the stimulus (e.g., dark-skinned African American) is suggestive of the stimulus priming a bias which means the participant must spend more time using appropriate techniques to identify the word (Schiller et al., 2016). In adults, the IAT was used to determine if hostile sexism—belief that women use sexuality to control men and gain social status—leads to the seeing sexualized women as having less control over their behavior (Cikara, Eberhardt, & Fiske, 2011). The IAT results suggest that men with hostile sexism tend to objectify sexualized women, such as those seen in advertisements; however, men with hostile sexism did not differ to those with benevolent sexism—viewing women as nurturing and needing protection—when asked to determine if they had seen a sexualized female body during a previous task (participants with either form or sexism were better at recalling bodies rather than faces). This means that negative bias against women may have influenced participants’ behaviors but any bias towards women may affect how they are observed and remembered.
As noted near the beginning of this post, there are approaches to reducing prejudice, such as color-blindness. Although the color-blindness approach may have good intentions, it leads one to ignore important cultural and historical contexts that make up an individual’s identity. By ignoring aspects of identity, those who are part of the majority often accidentally increase tensions between their group and minority groups. Instead, research suggests that frequent exposure and recognition of other races may lead to better outcomes. In a longitudinal study of college students from their first semester to graduating with a 4-year degree, researchers found that participants’ color-blindness approach to diversity decreased with frequent exposure to other races/ethnicities (Neville, Poteat, Lewis, & Spanierman, 2014). Although Neville and colleagues (2014) examined color-blindness rather than intentional prejudice, the results show that there may be hope to reduce prejudice that has already been learned.
Conclusion: Overall, the above information points to biological and learned factors that may attribute to prejudice, suggesting that humans may be biologically built to learn prejudice. To avoid learning prejudice, some parents may take on other philosophies to teach their children, such as color-blindness to treat everyone as equal and not discuss color. While parents’ intentions may be good, the color-blind approach may inadvertently cause harm to relationships. Instead, frequent contact with and openly acknowledging other races/ethnicities may decrease prejudices that humans appear biologically ready to cultivate.
- Bronson, P., & PM, A. M. O. 9/4/09 at 8:00. (2009, September 4). Even Babies Discriminate: A NurtureShock Excerpt. Retrieved February 21, 2017, from http://www.newsweek.com/even-babies-discriminate-nurtureshock-excerpt-79233
- Cikara, M., Eberhardt, J. L., & Fiske, S. T. (2011). From agents to objects: Sexist attitudes and neural responses to sexualized targets. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(3), 540–551.
- Neville, H. A., Poteat, V. P., Lewis, J. A., & Spanierman, L. B. (2014). Changes in White college students’ color-blind racial ideology over 4 years: Do diversity experiences make a difference? Journal of Counseling Psychology, 61(2), 179–190. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035168
- Russell, K. (2010, December 22). Are we born racist? The talk you must have with your children. Retrieved from https://www.parentmap.com/article/are-we-born-racist-the-talk-you-must-have-with-your-children
- Schiller, B., Gianotti, L. R. R., Baumgartner, T., Nash, K., Koenig, T., & Knoch, D. (2016). Clocking the social mind by identifying mental processes in the IAT with electrical neuroimaging. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(10), 2786–2791. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1515828113
- Vogel, M., Monesson, A., & Scott, L. S. (2012). Building biases in infancy: the influence of race on face and voice emotion matching: Influence of race on face and voice emotion matching. Developmental Science, 15(3), 359–372. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2012.01138.x