Poster #65 - An Intersectional Analysis of Children’s Race, Gender, and Attractiveness Biases

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Diversity, Equity & Social Justice

Integrative Statement

Children consistently display social biases on the basis of others’ race, gender, and attractiveness. Although research and social policy have more often focused on race and gender, some evidence suggests that the degree to which children favor attractive over unattractive others may be greater than the extent to which they favor same-race and same-gender others (Rennels & Langlois, 2014). The current study was designed to validate and expand on this evidence by attending to various methodological concerns in Rennels and Langlois (2014) and by measuring children’s bias toward targets that vary simultaneously on attractiveness, gender, and race using multiple measures of bias. This design not only allowed for a direct comparison of bias strength across domains, but also permitted the exploration of different patterns of bias as multiple social categories were intersected. Participants included 120 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade European- and African-American children (25% African-American) who were presented with 16 photographs of unfamiliar target children that simultaneously varied (based on pre-testing) by attractiveness (high/low), race (European-/African-American), and gender (male/female). They completed nine evaluative ratings for each (5-point Likert scale), yielding three composite measures of bias for each target type: General liking (GL), performance prediction (PP), and trait attribution (TA; see Table 1 for items). Participants also rated their perceptions of similarity between themselves and each target (also yielding a composite score for each target type; PS). A series of 2 (participant gender) X 2 (participant race) X 2 (target gender: own, other) X 2 (target race: own, other) X 2 (target attractiveness: high, low) mixed model ANOVAs was conducted on the three evaluative composite scores (i.e., GL, PP, TA) and the similarity to self measure (PS). Children consistently displayed bias favoring high-attractive targets and own-gender targets across the three evaluative measures and the PS measure; however, own-race favorability, when observed, was limited to specific levels of the participant or other target factors (e.g., for GL, European-Americans only displayed own-race favorability toward low-attractive targets). Additional analyses contrasting the magnitude of main effect sizes for each ANOVA revealed that the magnitude of attractiveness bias generally was as strong or stronger than that of gender bias, and that both were consistently stronger than race-based bias (see Figure 1). Overall, our data suggest that children’s social evaluations are influenced by the multiple social categorizations of others, and that the attractiveness of others may have a particularly strong impact on evaluations. Follow-up of some interactions involving multiple target factors also revealed a pattern similar to the Black Sheep Effect (Marques & Paez, 1995) wherein the degree that targets were differentiated on the basis of one dimension (e.g., attractiveness) was greater when they were in-group on another dimension (e.g., own-gender) rather than out-group (other-gender). Additional research using this intersectionality approach is needed to better understand how multiple target categorizations influence children’s evaluations.

Authors

• Michael John Sauceda, Saint Louis University
  Presenting Author

• Kimberly K Powlishta, Saint Louis University
  Non-Presenting Author