Babies aren’t born racist, but a new study has found that they start discriminating against other races by the time they are nine months old.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts studied 48 Caucasian babies and found that as they got older, they found it easier to interact with white adults than adults from other races.
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Scientists chose white infants who had little or no exposure to black adults.
The babies then completed two simple tasks, one which measured how well they could tell the difference between two white adults and two black adults, and another which tested their abilities to read the facial expressions of people from different races.
At five months old, the babies showed no differences in their interactions with white or black adults, but by the time they were nine months old, they were far better at relating to white adults.
The older infants could more easily differentiate between white faces than those of other races, and were better at reading the body language of white people too.
Study leaders say this shows children’s attitudes to race form long before they can understand anything their parents might be telling them.
This is because of a developmental phenomenon similar to how children learn languages. At first, babies’ brains take in sounds made by all languages but quickly start to focus on the language they hear most often.
Following the same principle, infants who largely interact with people of the same race, start becoming more attuned to that race, at the expense of others.
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Researchers say this phenomenon could be at the heart of common racial stereotypes such as thinking people from other races “all look the same” or that they are somehow inferior.
The study is published in the current issue of Developmental Science.
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