BABY RACISTS

People show bias in first 6 to 9 months: studies

BEFORE THEY’RE even old enough to walk, babies have racist tendencies, two studies found.

University of Toronto researchers found that infants as young as 6 to 9 months show racial bias — contradicting the popular view that it first emerges in a child’s preschool years. Still, bias is believed to be learned behavior.

“What this means is that we’re not really born with some kind of racial bias,” said lead researcher Kang Lee.

Lee said he believes the phenomenon is not a result of parents teaching their kids to discriminate. Instead, it’s a function of the homogenous environments in which most children grow up.

“One very likely source of bias is our lack of exposure to other- raced individuals in the first six months of life,” said Lee, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. “That lack of exposure sets up this bias.”

The first study found infants older than six months associate people of the same race with happy music, and those of other races with sad music. Researchers came to that conclusion after testing 193 Chinese infants, ages 3 to 9 months, who had never had direct contact with people of other races.

The babies were shown videos of six Asian women and six African women, paired with either happy or sad music. Infants less than 6 months old didn’t associate happy or sad music with members of any particular race, the study showed.

But at nine months, the babies gazed at their own-race faces paired with happy music for a longer time. They did the same for other-race faces paired with sad music, researchers found.

“This suggests that when children see an other-raced person, they already have negative associations,” Lee said.

The second study examined whether the race of an adult factors into a child’s learning skills.

Researchers showed babies videos of adults of different races either looking toward or away from photos of animals.

When the adults were looking in the direction of the animals — indicating they were reliable — the infants followed them equally regardless of race, the study found.

The same results held when the adults were looking in the wrong direction — indicating that they were unreliable.

But when the adults were only sometimes accurate, the infants were far more likely to follow the gaze of adults of the same race.

The takeaway, Lee said, is troubling: Babies are less likely to learn from people of a different race than their own.