Poster #107 - Children’s biased perceptual and social processing of faces of different races

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

Experiences with face-races significantly bias children’s face processing abilities. At perceptual level, children exhibited advantages in recognizing own-race faces (the other-race effect, ORE, Wong et al., 2020; Woo et al., 2020); Alongside ORE, children were also better and faster at categorizing other-race faces, a phenomenon known as the other-race advantage (ORA, Ge et al., 2009; Zhao & Bentin, 2008). Recent studies suggested that the strength of ORA and ORE at perceptual level held downstream social consequences (Xiao et al., 2018). However, whether the downstream social consequences remain the same among different race groups for children from multiracial communities remains unknown. This, the present study investigated the varying strengths of perceptual and social biases White Canadian children have for various racial groups (East Asian, Black, Latino, & White).
Thirty-nine White Canadian children between the ages of 36-96 months participated in two online experiments. Experiment 1 aimed to test participants’ ORA and ORE between own-race (White) and other-race (East Asian, Black, & Latino) faces. Children were given a standard Face Recognition and Face Race Categorization task, where we measured their response accuracy and response time. Children were most accurate at recognizing own-race White faces compared to Black, Asian, and Latino faces (p < .05). Among the other-race groups, children were the worst at recognizing Black faces compared to Asian and Latino faces (p < .05) and there was no significant effect between Asian and Latino faces (p > .05). Children were also more accurate when categorizing own-race White faces and Black faces compared to Asian and Latino faces (p < .05). These results suggest that children’s face perception capabilities depended on specific face-race, rather than a dichotomous classification of own- and other-race faces.
Experiment 2 aimed to investigate children’s racial biases. In the experiment, participants were presented a child face photo (East Asian, Black, Latino, or White) with a respective biography conveying information about the face photo. Then, participants answered 6 questions regarding their opinions towards the face using a 3-points scale of how likely they would perform an action (e.g., If this child cheated, how much would you want to tell the teacher). Each question displayed types of social scenarios within six categories: loyalty, affiliation, trust, teamwork, wealth, and how Canadian they viewed the given face to be to be. Afterwards, participants were asked to remember all the information about the target face’s biography. We found that children’s attitudes towards a race group did not exist universally and depended on the specific ethnicity and context. For instance, children rated Black faces lower compared to White and Latino faces in scenarios regarding trust while there was no difference between ratings in social scenarios regarding teamwork (p < .05).
In sum, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that children do not possess the same bias for all other-race groups; certain other-race groups are favored over others. These findings suggest that perceptual and social biases are more nuanced than the dichotomous classification of an own-race face versus other-race face.

Authors

• Ho Wing Chan
  Presenting Author

• Naiqi G Xiao, McMaster University