Poster #24 - American Children’s Understanding of Skin Color Inheritance

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Skin color is afforded greater social significance in America society than other physical attributes because it serves a primary role in racial classification. Despite the outsized role skin color plays in children’s reasoning about social categories we know relatively little about how American children conceptualize the properties of skin color and its inheritance. Prior research (Hirschfeld, 1995; Roberts & Gelman, 2015) investigating how children and adults categorize the offspring of parents from the same and different racial categories has shown that older children and adults tend to categorize biracial children as non-White.

To glean a richer characterization of children’s predictions, we created a continuous color space of skin tones ranging from pale beige to dark brown. Children were asked to predict the specific skin color of babies born to three cartoon parental pairs (one couple with lighter skin colors, one couple with darker skin colors, and a couple with one lighter and one darker parent). Children were then shown a series of cartoon babies exhibiting a range of skin colors sampled from the color space and for each were asked whether they thought it could possibly be the child of the couple with one light and one dark parent. The first task was aimed at assessing children’s specific, unconstrained color predictions, whereas the second task gauged their implicit understanding of the stochasticity of this process. Children also participated in a between-participant control condition that employed the same color space and task for a different stimulus domain (liquid): pairs of colored fluids (specifically “drinks”) that are poured together and mixed to produce a homogenous outcome liquid.

Participants were 112 children (57 in skin condition, 55 in liquid condition) between 4 and 11 years of age tested at a science museum in the American Midwest. Of these, 102 lived primarily in the United States and provided race and ethnicity information: 62% White Only, 19% Multiracial, 17% Black Only, 3% Latino Only. Preliminary analyses revealed several intriguing patterns. Predictions for the skin colors of babies with two lighter parents and two darker parents diverged with age, as demonstrated by a significant interaction between parental race and age group (F(2,51)=5.626, p<0.007; Figure 1). An overwhelming majority of monoracial White participants (94%) predicted a lighter skin color for the biracial baby than the parental color midpoint, whereas 40% of monoracial Black participants and 50% of Multiracial participants predicted a skin color that was darker than the midpoint. The number of endorsed “possible” shades was lower for liquid than skin outcomes across the tested age groups, as revealed by a main effect of condition on the “Possible” Shade Count (F(1,100)=13.4, p<0.001; Figure 2). Although more participants are needed to clarify the relationship between participant race and prediction asymmetries, the findings to date suggest that young children expect skin color inheritance to be stochastic and cultivate a differentiated pattern of prediction for skin color inheritance over the ages tested. These patterns offer an early glimpse into how children reason about multiracial families and the inheritance of race.

Authors

• Rebecca F Schwarzlose, Washington University in Saint Louis
  Presenting Author

• Ariel A. Miller, Washington University in Saint Louis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lori Markson, Washington University in St Louis
  Non-Presenting Author