Even A Baby Could Be Racist, So You Could Reverse The Bias, Study

Even three-month-old babies tend to be biased towards women of their own race, according to dailymail.

In order to undo this subtle racial bias among smaller children, a University of Delaware scientist is trying out a simple exercise.

For a decade, Paul Quinn has studied infants watching faces, and has discovered how they classify race and gender. When six months old, the infants classified faces into three groups - Caucasian, African and Asian.

By the time they were nine months old, they could not only distinguish racial categories but also became less able to tell different individuals apart if they were members of a "less-familiar race".

Hence, white babies can make out that white faces belong to different individuals, but cannot see Asian or African faces as "distinct individuals"s.

"Might these perceptual biases we see in infants be related to the social biases that we see in older kids, beginning at three or four years of age, and adults?," Quinn said. "And if they are, can we use a technique to reduce bias?As we tried to answer this question, we hit on the idea that if the perceptual and social biases are linked, we might be able to reduce the social bias by perceptual means."

In their latest study, published in July in the journal Developmental Science, Quinn and his team in China used photos of African and Asian faces and put them together to create ambiguous images that looked equally African and Asian, but had pleasant faces. A few faces looked severe.

Scientists showed the infants the faces. They identified the happy faces as Asian, while the angry faces were identified as African, as it was a group they saw rarely in life.

The youngsters were shown five different African faces, giving each person a different name, and repeated the process till they could identify every face by name.

Hence, by looking at faces' expressions, the children could respond to the faces as persons not as a category.

"This process of getting the kids to respond to the [five African] faces as individuals, not as a category, only takes 15-30 minutes, and it made a significant difference," Quinn said.

"It suggests that what is a social bias has [visual] perceptual components and that it can be disrupted."

Quinn's related study in UD lab with babies from the Newark, Delaware, area has got an online publication by Developmental Science, with more publication in the future.

In this study, researchers worked with Caucasian babies to explore how and at what ages they began forming categories of people based on the racial characteristics of faces.