An international research team has been studying racial bias in children—how it develops and how it can be addressed.
We have known for a long time that babies and young children look longer at things they like, and not so long at things they don’t like. Pretty straightforward, right? More recently, we learned that when it comes to adult faces, babies like the kinds of faces they already know more than they like the kinds of faces that are new to them (Bar-Haim et al., 2006). White Israeli babies prefer White adult faces. Black Ethiopian babies prefer Black adult faces. But Ethiopian babies living in Israeli resettlement campus don’t show a preference, presumably because they are living in a multiracial environment. It’s a matter of favoring the familiar, not the similar.
Continue reading “Segregation means that the similar is also the familiar”