Ethnic Identity Formation and the Development of Bias
(Text Version of Live Lecture)
Kathy A. Bobula, Ph.D.
Introduction
Children are born into a family, and that family they are born into comes with one or more ethnic cultures that have been passed down and modified for generations. It does not matter what the composition of the current family is, or how many people are in it. Culture is inside of us. We learn it from living it, even if we don’t always think about it consciously.
Humans created culture as a social adaptation to the world in which we live. We developed language, customs, food ways, family structures, and hundreds of other cultural “ways.” These adaptations have been critical to our survival and children begin to learn them from birth on.
Many people are born into multi-cultural families. They learn cultural “ways” from more than one cultural tradition. Even if we don’t “know” much about our ethnic backgrounds, we were all impacted by them through decisions our parents made and the “micro-practices” they employed in raising us.
Our ethnic cultural background has given us our values, beliefs, and assumptions, our ways of approaching problems, and more. It is through our ethnicity that we find we have similarities with some people. It also reminds us of how we are different from others.
We learn about our family culture by experiencing it, and from making sense of these experiences. In this way, children construct their own concept of their ethnic identity. So how does this happen? And, are there any problems in this process today, in the 21st century?
One of the problems we can encounter in discussing this topic has to do with our ideas about race and ethnicity. So, before we go any farther, let’s pause and take a look at this confusion that is still very common when we are talking about people’s ethnicity. Many people get ethnicity confused with the idea of “race.”
What is “race”?
Race is a constructed category. It is a social concept that was constructed by people to divide up the world’s populations based on their physical characteristics and somewhat on their geographical location. Biologically, though, race is not real! There is no genetic or biological basis for dividing people into different “racial” groups.
Differences we see in physical appearance (the characteristics most often used to categorize people by “race”) are variations that are typically due to prior geographical isolation of groups of people over a long period of time. Under these circumstances, particular characteristics get preserved in the population. When formerly isolated people meet, there is typically an exchange of genetic material! Today, with an ever increasing number of new combinations of multi-ethnic families within the U.S., we are seeing new changes in physical characteristics.
Now, some major physical differences we see among people have been due to genetic mutations that were advantageous over evolutionary time. Lighter colored skin (or “white” skin), for example, is a mutation that proved adaptive for people living in the far north of the globe. Let me explain why in case you don’t already know.
Humans need calcium in their bones to keep the bones strong. To deposit calcium in the bones requires Vitamin D. We cannot get Vitamin D from foods, so the body has to synthesize it. The catalyst for creating Vitamin D in the body is sunshine reaching the skin.
Now, pigmentation of the skin impacts how easily and quickly the sun can cause the body to make Vitamin D. The darker the skin, the longer the exposure needed. The lighter the skin, the less time required. Darker skin tones were highly advantageous to the evolution of humans around the equator where there is lots of sun all year long. It was a protection from too much sun, but allowed enough to provide for the Vitamin D.
For humans who migrated north from the equator, they were moving into territory that reduced the amount of sun exposure, especially during the winter months. Those migrating humans who had lighter skin were able to synthesize Vitamin D more rapidly – with shorter periods of exposure - and thus had stronger bones, a clear advantage for survival. Those who survived reproduced offspring, and the offspring who inherited the lighter skin also survived to reproduce, and so on.
Thus we have variations in the physical characteristics of people – both individual and group characteristics, but they do not represent this thing we call race. As we came to have contact with one another, blending of characteristics occurred. This is not a recent social development.
In summary, biological race is a made-up concept. However, we still “act” like it is real. As we look at children’s developing concepts of their ethnic identity, we must, then, look at how concepts of “race” get woven into this – even though they are not real.
Introduction to Ethnic Identity Development
Ethnic identity refers to the long list of cultural elements and practices that our ancestors passed on to us. Ethnicity is a living representation of our collective identities. Everyone is influenced by the ethnicity or ethnicities into which they are born and raised.
Infants and Toddlers: birth to 2 years
Beginning at birth, ethnic culture is experienced and learned, though not self-consciously, meaning we are not aware that we are learning it. Babies hear the language, smell and taste the foods, see the way people look and interact in their environment. In fact, as a little aside, we’ve discovered that the food a mother eats flavors her breast milk, thereby helping the baby make a successful transition to solid foods. So breast fed babies taste their family’s ethnicity from birth on.
All these aspects of their world (smells and tastes included!) become familiar to them and become part of who they are, as they fit themselves into the social group. Babies have been discovered to even babble with the accent of the language that they hear. For most infants, it is a seamless process. It just happens. So, it makes sense that recognition of one’s own ethnicity or race typically occurs before the correct labeling of others. For the baby, they know who is “like me” and who is not.
Preschoolers: 2-5 years
During the preschool years, ages 2-5, concepts of ethnicity (or race) develop. They develop as children begin to “sort” people by how they look: old or young; male or female; big or little, etc. Thus, they also sort by characteristics that they associate with ethnicity or, so-called, race.
During the preschool years (for children who are sighted), conceptual learning about ethnic differences between people focuses primarily on visual characteristics, such as:
-skin tone
-hair color and texture
-shape of facial features
In and of itself there is nothing wrong with noticing these things about people. They are part of who we are.
The problems come in when we begin to associate values with these superficial characteristics: like thinking that African American (black) people are angry, that European Americans (white) are smarter than other people, and that Mexican American (brown) people are lazy.
School-agers: 6 years +
As children get a little older, they begin to take into consideration what is “inside” the person, like their intentions or behavior, when they are talking about how one person is different from another.
Members of the dominant culture, though, are typically socialized to view their ethnicity (or race) as “normal” or typical. This sense of “white privilege” is learned through observation, experience, and direct teaching. By age 6 years, children of the dominant culture show strong in-group preference, similar to that of dominant culture adults.
How can we get a better understanding of this?
Quintana’s Model
To get some insights, let’s take a look at what one author has described in terms of what children understand about ethnicity and race as they get older. Stephen Quintana described a model he developed in an article entitled “Children’s developmental understanding of ethnicity and race.” His model is grounded in the body of research that had been done to date on how children construct their understandings of race and/or ethnicity.
The model:
· Is based on theories of social perspective-taking, which assumes that the “self” develops within the context of social relationships.
· Can be extended to any racial or ethnic group.
· Is a stage model; he calls the stages “levels” and there are a total of 5.
We’ll take a look at the first two levels that cover the years from 3 to 10.
Level 0 (ages 3-6 years) Integration of affective and perceptual understanding of ethnicity:
Quintana states that “in the development of their racial and ethnic cognition, the key developmental task for young preschool children appears to be the integration of their biological [what people look like] and affective [what emotions I feel about people who look like that] conceptions of race with their perceptions of race in their social environment.” (1998, 33) He says that:
· Attitudes (unconscious or implicit) develop before identification (conscious and explicit) and reflect the wider society’s views.
· In spite of what we tend to think, attitudes developed are unrelated to parents’ explicit attitudes or those of friends, and can change based on circumstances. (They are constructed by the child!)
“During this developmental period, children learn to perceptually differentiate racial and ethnic groups. Moreover, children clearly prefer to base their verbal descriptions and explanations on external and physical manifestations of ethnicity and race.” (34)
Thus, all the unconscious emotional associations that were learned in the first several years of life get associated with visible characteristics of people – either physical characteristics (skin color, hair texture, etc.) or behavioral characteristics (language or accent, clothing, food ways, body movement, etc.).
Level 1 (ages 6-10 years) Literal understanding of ethnicity:
Quintana says that “the transition from level 0 to level 1 in children’s ethnic cognition represents a significant developmental leap. At level 1, which he calls the literal understanding of ethnicity, children’s definitions of ethnicity and race correspond much more closely to definitions commonly used by adults.” (34) Research has found the following characteristics of the thinking of 6-10 year olds on ethnicity:
· Ethnicity is seen as being made up of customs, ancestry, language, and food ways.
· Categorization of the ethnic or racial status of a person becomes more accurate.
· Schemas are still very literal.
· Concrete Operations, however, allows children to consider dual perspectives (such as how a person looks and their personality or behavior characteristics).
Children whose understanding of ethnicity reaches this level have a “tendency to describe and define ethnicity based on nonobservable, inferred characteristics…” as well as express their “awareness of [the] unique, covert [or unseen] lives of individuals.” (36)
Since children have unconscious, emotional, and evaluative associations about characteristics of people which were acquired during infancy and early toddlerhood, these associations, these feelings, will be a part of the information that children will use as they develop their understandings of race and ethnicity.
Introduction to the Development of Bias
Many people who are interested in the early years of life, be it as a parent or as a teacher/caregiver of young children, hold images of the youngest of children as being “innocent” and incapable of having negatively biased conceptions of other people. Furthermore, they see young children as “not noticing” differences between people and accepting everyone. Unfortunately, these concepts of young children are more an expression of what some people might “like” them to be! They do not express the actual nature of children’s construction of knowledge in the early years.
Let’s look at categorization skills in early childhood. Young children, in general, learn that @ differences exist that can be categorized (such as colors, animals, and foods). This is one of the major themes on Sesame Street! Categorization is not, however, limited to colors and foods. @ Young children also learn that people have differences that can be classified or categorized and these are based on perceptual cues – what they look like, sound like, and smell like. @ Finally, young children learn that these differences can have values attached to them. We can like or dislike characteristics, and this brings us to a concept from social psychology, that of attitudes.
Attitudes are systems that we construct which are composed of:
-beliefs about “something” (thoughts)
-feelings about “that thing” (emotions)
-predisposition to respond to “that thing” based on the beliefs and feelings (behavior)
Let’s look at some examples.
If I believe old people are slow, and if I feel frustrated if I am held up or slowed down when I’m trying to get somewhere, then I may run ahead of an old person while on the way to the shortest check-out line in a grocery store!
If I believe that all young African American men are violence prone, and if I fear people who I believe to be violent, I’ll be predisposed to avoid young African American men, and I might cross the street to avoid passing close by two of them coming down the sidewalk.
Because all thoughts have emotions attached to them, children learn the values, feelings, and meanings of all their experiences. They pick up on our responses, and learn them, for better or for worse! This is a key concept in social learning theory. We copy not only the behaviors of those around us, who we see as effective and successful; we copy their feelings too! Some authors call this catching of another’s feelings, “emotional contagion.” So, we are learning or catching attitudes about other people from those who care for us.
Now, particular types of attitudes are referred to as biases. Bias has been studied extensively and we now know a lot of how biases come to be and how we can change them. Let’s take a look at the two basic types of bias.
Two types of bias:
1. Explicit bias is overt behavior intended to do harm to people of some “unfavored” status. It is conscious, meaning that we are aware of the feelings and what it means to us. Telling a Mexican American person an apartment is already rented when it is not is an example of explicit bias.
2. Implicit bias includes stereotyped beliefs and attitudes that people can hold about social groups of any variety. It is mostly unconscious, meaning that these attitudes, these associations are not in our awareness, even though they can and do influence our behavior and choices.
An example of implicit bias could be a parent (who has been inviting various children from their child’s preschool over to play with their child) “never getting around” to calling the family who is Muslim, even though their children play together almost every day at preschool. In this example, the family who is excluded will most likely be fully aware of the biased treatment (through mirror neuron systems).
Through education and increased public awareness, most people have learned to suppress the expression of any explicit biases that they hold. Implicit bias (still alive and well) is more prevalent than explicit bias and can impact our perceptions, our judgments, and our behavior, including who we choose to befriend, and who we hire, so says the research. So, what are some of the influences on the development of the specific negative biases about people who are different from us? Where do children learn these biased associations? Let’s take a look.
Influences:
Children’s observations of other people’s reactions to themselves as well as to other people are a major source of attitudes and associations that we learn in the early years of life. Children also need the opportunity to observe differences in people, so the social environment in which the child is raised will also play a part in what the child learns.
Family members and other caregivers give us our earliest evaluations of others based on their emotional and non-verbal cues. We also pick up on a lot from overheard conversations as young children accompany adults through their everyday tasks. Once we come in contact with peers who are not from our own family or in-group, we also pick up on the evaluations that they have learned.
Product packaging and advertising contains evaluative information about the product or about who should buy it. Web sites for children’s toys are divided between boys’ toys and girls’ toys, and the children shown playing with the toys are typically European American.
Mass media (movies, television) tells us which groups are strong and powerful, and which ones are weak and insignificant by who is put into a particular role. In addition, from a variety of sources (family and friends included), we come across what are called “value laden words.” These are often phrases that contain a “huge” message that is based in stereotypes and negative associations. People often use them without ever reflecting on what they are saying.
Teachers who refer to a group of wiggly and inattentive children as being like a bunch of “wild Indians” are a good example. What does this say about how a teacher views Native Americans? What are the children learning about Native Americans? Singing the counting song, “Ten Little Indians,” equates a people with counting bears.
I want to share one more example which is one that really “blew my mind” as they say. This has to do with the use of pseudo-language, where a person pretends to be speaking another language, but is actually making up the words and having them “sound” like they are in that language. This is incredibly disrespectful and it teaches children that languages other than their own are “gibberish” or without real meaning.
A now-retired Spanish teacher with whom I worked shared this example with me. He went into a local fast-food restaurant one day for lunch and noted that the establishment had put in a salad bar. It featured some Mexican cuisine type ingredients and over top of it there was a sign that called it “Salado Barra.” My friend was shocked as “Salado Barra” (in Spanish) essentially meant “salty brick!” He couldn’t believe it, so he asked to speak to the manager. He told the manager who he was and what the sign said in Spanish, assuming the manager would have it changed immediately! Who wants a salad called salty brick? The manager couldn’t see what the fuss was about, and furthermore, he said he liked the name – he thought it was clever! The sign remained and to this day I wonder just how many people who spoke Spanish actually got a salad there! More seriously, leaving the sign like that perpetuated the biased attitude the manager had about people who do not speak English, that their first language is not a “real” language – with meaning!
During the preschool years a directional set is given to the mind. It is called the process of “selective perception” and it gives attitudes their final form. We see the world through the lenses of what we already know. The following phrase captures this situation:
“I wouldn’t have seen it if I didn’t believe it.”
We usually say the opposite, that I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes! This, instead, says that if I believe something is true, I will reconstruct my perceptions to coincide with my beliefs. If I think that people in wheelchairs are intellectually challenged (rather than motor challenged), then I will question and remember only the times they make an error rather than all the times they were correct. A study done many years ago found that teacher perceptions of how smart their pupils were had a stronger correlation with their overall grades than the students’ I.Q. scores, or level of intelligence.
It is critical that we challenge our unfounded beliefs about groups of people with certain characteristics, or no matter what our intent is, we will inevitably express these non-verbally and pass them on to the children with whom we have contact. On the other hand, this also means that if we could work to reduce our own implicit biases and stereotyped beliefs, we might stop the transmission of these biased notions to the upcoming generations. But, until that happens, we need to look at how the development of prejudice occurs, and it does so in developmental stages.
Developmental stages of prejudice – or, what we see
Birth – 2 years old
Infancy is a time of pre-generalized learning without understanding. It is a “feelings” only type of learning. However, infants do notice physical differences in people. Infants and toddlers learn biased evaluations through implicit learning which is unconscious. They learn what is “me/not me;” and who is in my in-group, and who is not? Infants and toddlers notice physical differences in people and they mimic both adult behavior and feelings. Therefore, if a baby in arms watches their parent have a fear response to particular types of people, they are capable of learning to fear people who look like that.
Preschool years: 3-5
By age 3, there is a development of explicit attitudes as preschoolers have language. Because of this, the preschool years are the best time to help children develop positive feelings about their own and others’ ethnicity through talking about it. Preschoolers who constructively interact on a regular basis with children who are different from them in some way tend to see these differences as falling within their constructed in-group. They stop being an “other.”
By age 3 implicit, unconscious biases are in place. Critical thinking is limited, so it is easy for preschoolers to believe stereotypes.
Middle childhood: 6 years +
-During middle childhood, we begin to see a differentiation of prejudice, which is characterized:
-by it being less total (they exempt certain people)
-by trying to make it more rational and acceptable
-by this applying only to explicit bias; as implicit bias stays steady
Developmental stages of prejudice – or, how does this happen?
Birth to 6:
Research has found evidence that infancy and early childhood are the periods in development during which implicit or unconscious biases and stereotypical associations are put into place. @ The elements that make up these associations are both innate (or “nature” meaning there is a genetic predisposition) as well as learned (or “nurture” meaning it is constructed by the child from their experiences). According to one author, “much of what is learned early in life is preverbal and taught indirectly. These lessons form the foundation on which later learning is built and may also serve as a nonconscious source for related evaluations and actions.” (Rudman 2004, 79)
Babies and young children use social referencing to “read” the parent’s evaluation of individual people or groups of people. Through mirror neurons, the child “feels” what the parent is feeling and the child remembers the association. If a parent holds on to their child a little tighter when they pass by someone who is different from them, the child learns to associate “fear” or “avoidance” with that person and what they look like. They may even generalize these associations to other people who “look like” the original person. These are examples of learning by experience, or “nurture.”
What do we know about “nature’s” role? One of the things we know is that newborns prefer face-like configurations to other patterns that are equally complex, but not face-like. This, in combination with the discovery of a “face recognition area” in the brain, suggests that this preference for faces is innate. “However, infants also prefer to look at the face of and hear the voice of their primary caregiver, prefer the sound of their native language, prefer women’s faces and prefer faces of racial ingroup members” say authors Dunham, Baron and Banaji. “This latter set of preferences is clearly learned; [because] infants whose primary caregivers are male or who are frequently exposed to racial outgroups do not show these normative patterns of preference. Overall, these results indicate the role of both innate proclivities and early experience in shaping preferences.” (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji 2008, 248) Babies prefer who and what is familiar to them.
In addition, the data presented in the article by Dunham, et al., suggest that “implicit intergroup preferences follow a decidedly different pattern” than explicit preferences which develop more slowly. The implicit preferences are] characterized by early emergence of ingroup preference followed by developmental stability.” (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji 2008, 249) These same authors, in an earlier work (2006) found evidence that this pattern was true cross-culturally in young children.
From an evolutionary perspective, we can ask, what would be the advantage of having this implicit in-group preference and having it emerge early? To start with, “humans are among the most social of all primates and success in social interactions is one of the major forces driving our evolution.” (Frith & Frith 2008, 503) In the paper by Dunham, Baron, and Banaji, the authors state that “the implicit [or unconscious] system forms and maintains adultlike intergroup evaluations from early in development.” This ability to quickly evaluate other groups along a good-bad continuum and “to use those evaluations as guides to action is fundamental to an organism’s survival and plausibly forms part of an evolved mechanism to track and monitor social coalitions.” “The early presence of group-based evaluations probably implicates a general system for rapid preference formation, grounded in the evaluative or attitudinal system”, which is processed as implicit memory. (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji 2008, 252) Being built in, this would be “nature.”
By age 4 or 5, racial schemas are well established and these schemas have judgments attached to them.
· By age 5, children have constructed a basic sense of their own ethnic or racial identity and are beginning to explore what that means. A part of their racial schemas includes the categorization of people as being a member of their in-group or a member of an out-group. Children show preference for people who are members of one of their in-groups. In addition, by that time, they are aware of biases based on differences, as by age 3 or 4 many children are already showing discomfort, dislike, or fear toward people who are different from them in terms of race or ethnicity (as well as ability, gender, age, size, etc.).
“Children [who are] from ethnic or racial groups that are socially advantaged (and, hence, dominant) show robust preferences for their ingroup.” In one study, White 6-year-olds in the U.S. showed the same levels of manifested in-group preference as White adults in the U.S. (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji 2008, 249) In this study, White “children as young as three who could successfully categorize by race showed a tendency to be influenced by facial expression such that angry faces were overcategorized as Black, demonstrating a negative association with that group.” (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji 2008, 250)
In another study with a similar finding, Hispanic children as young as age five, and who grew up in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, “showed no preference for their ingroup when compared with the White majority…. Interestingly, these same Hispanic children … did show ingroup preference when comparing their group to Black Americans. This result is noteworthy because it demonstrates that children’s implicit attitudes are sensitive to which of two outgroups (White and Black) is socioculturally advantaged.” (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji 2008, 251) Here we see an example of the co-construction of schemas of race and class in early childhood. This means that young children are not only learning to categorize people by race or ethnicity but also by their apparent social status in the community. It also means they are able to do social comparison – of their group compared to another group.
So, is there a developmental pathway that older children and adults tend to follow in their understandings about race and ethnicity? Dunham, Baron, & Banaji (2006, 1278) in their cross cultural study, found the following trends:
By age 6, we see that:
· implicit bias is robust and stable about both high and low status outgroups; and that a
· general, undifferentiated bias against racial out-groups (both implicit and explicit) exists and is most likely a product of in-group favoritism.
By age 10, we see that:
· implicit bias is stable, but explicit bias is going through an age related decline in strength; and there is
· continued undifferentiated implicit bias against both high and low status outgroups.
By Adulthood, we find that:
· implicit bias is stable;
· implicit bias against high status outgroups has declined; but
· implicit bias against low status outgroups has remained steady; and that
· explicit bias against both high and low status outgroups declines as a function of age, almost disappearing by adulthood.
Dunham, Baron & Banaji (2006) end their article about their research with some final thoughts. I decided to reproduce them here in their entirety.
“The presence of implicit bias in the youngest children tested, the enduring stability of those biases into adulthood, and their presence in a population that rarely encounters racial outgroups, is disconcerting. But perhaps we should not be surprised: Automatic evaluation appears to be a pervasive feature of human cognition, in the social domain and beyond. And despite the disconcerting nature of these findings, overcoming them requires first understanding them for what they are. As Richard Dawkins wrote about our genetic predispositions in 1976, ‘Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.’
“Adopting a similar tact, Dovidio and colleagues, for example, suggest the possibility of actually recruiting these automatic effects to reduce bias: If intergroup bias is an automatic feature of human social categorization, fostering the creation of more inclusive in-groups that cut across the usually divisive lines of race and gender could make a virtue of what first appears a vice.
“In adult social cognition, the investigation of implicit attitudes has provided a richer understanding of social bias and intergroup relations, yielding new insights into the causes and consequences of everyday prejudice and discrimination. Even the best intentioned among us are sometimes guilty of such behavior, and the striking divergence of implicit and explicit attitudes in middle childhood should remind us of where we began: Children are presented with deeply contradictory information about the meaning and importance of race, are at once exposed to repeated negative stereotypes and explicit exhortations against that negativity. The widening gap between implicit and explicit forms of bias may be the unsurprising consequence of that division.” (2006, 1279-1280)
Conclusion: Counteracting Bias
Let’s end on a positive note about bias by looking at how we can reduce it. What the brain can learn, the brain can re-learn in a new way. Our brains are very plastic, well into adulthood; you are never too old to change how you think and see the world!
So, what do we know so far about reducing implicit bias in particular?
1. People with a strong motivation to be unprejudiced tend to hold less implicit bias. So, if your values include a strong anti-bias approach, your implicit biases will tend to reduce over time.
2. We can train ourselves away from bias. Biases and stereotypes are learned through associational learning and reinforcement, so we can actually learn a new association; we can reinforce new meanings.
· What you have to do first is admit that you hold implicit biases that you probably learned in childhood.
· Next, you need to find out what the biases are, or what it IS about a group or characteristic of people that you learned. I’ll give you a resource to use for this in a minute.
· Then, based on what you find out, come up with a counter-stereotype to the biased notion. Try to be as specific as possible. The more specific, the better it works.
· Finally, say this counter-stereotype to yourself whenever you see or interact with someone of that group or with that characteristic.
In the original study that came up with this approach, they recruited people who held an implicit fear of African Americans (especially men).[1] They asked them to say the counter-stereotype “safe” internally to themselves every time they saw or interacted with an African American person. The technique worked to reduce the implicit bias they had toward African Americans. In fact, just deciding to do this began to reduce their implicit bias.
Implicit Bias Test:
To find out more about yourself and specific biases you might have learned (most likely) in childhood, you can take implicit bias tests at: www.implicit.harvard.edu. They have tests for a lot of groups and categories of people. You get feedback on the bias which will help you come up with a counter-stereotype to use to reduce the bias.
Let me end with a personal example on how I have done this. Not too long ago, my husband had to have his “other” hip replaced. About three weeks after the surgery, on a Monday, he accidently dislocated it which was an even bigger deal than just getting it replaced. It meant that I needed to stay at home with him for a week, and I was teaching 15 credits of face to face classes, five days a week. I had to transfer lectures into written format and put them on our class shell, take care of my husband who could not do anything by himself, and do all the other stuff of life on top of that! By Saturday, I was totally stressed out. My husband was asleep and I was working on a lecture similar to this one and was reminded that there was a study that found that when people are very stressed, their implicit biases get exaggerated. So, I went to the computer and started taking implicit bias tests. I took the one for Asian Americans and the test indicated a strong bias of not seeing Asian Americans as citizens!! I sat there and thought about how I could have learned that, and it only took a moment. I was born in May of 1945, at the end of World War II. The United States was at war with Japan.
During this period there was a lot of war propaganda produced for the U.S. government and much of it was in the form of cartoons. My parents bought an early television, and as a child I saw a lot of “old” cartoons, many of which were from WWII. They depicted Japanese people and particularly Japanese soldiers in the most highly stereotyped and negative manner. I learned stereotypes about Japanese people in particular and Asians in general. The messages of these cartoons were reinforced, I’m guessing, by my parents who had siblings and friends fighting in both Europe and the Pacific.
In response to finding this out, I came up with a counter-stereotype, “valued citizen,” which I say to myself whenever seeing or interacting with a person who is Asian American. I will continue to work on this and then take the test again to see how I’m doing!
We can change, and with the changes we can make, we reduce the possibilities that we will pass on biases to the next generations. I encourage you to give it a try yourself. The rewards are greater than just for you.
Sources:
Dunham, Y., Baron, A.S., & Banaji, M.R. (2006). From American city to Japanese Village: A cross-cultural investigation of implicit race attitudes. Child Development, 77, 1268-1281.
Dunham, Y., Baron, A.S., & Banaji, M.R. (2008). The development of implicit intergroup cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 248-253. doi:10.1016/j.tics.208.04.006
Frith, C.D. & Frith, U. (2008). Implicit and explicit processes in social cognition. Neuron, 60, 503-510. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2008.10.032
Rudman, L.A. (2004). Sources of implicit attitudes. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 13, 79-82.
Quintana, S.M. (1998). Children’s developmental understanding of ethnicity and race. Applied & Preventive Psychology. 7, 27-45.
2012
[1] Level of implicit bias was determined through the use of the Implicit Bias Test as well as fMRI measurements of amygdala activation, indicating a fear response.
Kathy A. Bobula, Ph.D.
Introduction
Children are born into a family, and that family they are born into comes with one or more ethnic cultures that have been passed down and modified for generations. It does not matter what the composition of the current family is, or how many people are in it. Culture is inside of us. We learn it from living it, even if we don’t always think about it consciously.
Humans created culture as a social adaptation to the world in which we live. We developed language, customs, food ways, family structures, and hundreds of other cultural “ways.” These adaptations have been critical to our survival and children begin to learn them from birth on.
Many people are born into multi-cultural families. They learn cultural “ways” from more than one cultural tradition. Even if we don’t “know” much about our ethnic backgrounds, we were all impacted by them through decisions our parents made and the “micro-practices” they employed in raising us.
Our ethnic cultural background has given us our values, beliefs, and assumptions, our ways of approaching problems, and more. It is through our ethnicity that we find we have similarities with some people. It also reminds us of how we are different from others.
We learn about our family culture by experiencing it, and from making sense of these experiences. In this way, children construct their own concept of their ethnic identity. So how does this happen? And, are there any problems in this process today, in the 21st century?
One of the problems we can encounter in discussing this topic has to do with our ideas about race and ethnicity. So, before we go any farther, let’s pause and take a look at this confusion that is still very common when we are talking about people’s ethnicity. Many people get ethnicity confused with the idea of “race.”
What is “race”?
Race is a constructed category. It is a social concept that was constructed by people to divide up the world’s populations based on their physical characteristics and somewhat on their geographical location. Biologically, though, race is not real! There is no genetic or biological basis for dividing people into different “racial” groups.
Differences we see in physical appearance (the characteristics most often used to categorize people by “race”) are variations that are typically due to prior geographical isolation of groups of people over a long period of time. Under these circumstances, particular characteristics get preserved in the population. When formerly isolated people meet, there is typically an exchange of genetic material! Today, with an ever increasing number of new combinations of multi-ethnic families within the U.S., we are seeing new changes in physical characteristics.
Now, some major physical differences we see among people have been due to genetic mutations that were advantageous over evolutionary time. Lighter colored skin (or “white” skin), for example, is a mutation that proved adaptive for people living in the far north of the globe. Let me explain why in case you don’t already know.
Humans need calcium in their bones to keep the bones strong. To deposit calcium in the bones requires Vitamin D. We cannot get Vitamin D from foods, so the body has to synthesize it. The catalyst for creating Vitamin D in the body is sunshine reaching the skin.
Now, pigmentation of the skin impacts how easily and quickly the sun can cause the body to make Vitamin D. The darker the skin, the longer the exposure needed. The lighter the skin, the less time required. Darker skin tones were highly advantageous to the evolution of humans around the equator where there is lots of sun all year long. It was a protection from too much sun, but allowed enough to provide for the Vitamin D.
For humans who migrated north from the equator, they were moving into territory that reduced the amount of sun exposure, especially during the winter months. Those migrating humans who had lighter skin were able to synthesize Vitamin D more rapidly – with shorter periods of exposure - and thus had stronger bones, a clear advantage for survival. Those who survived reproduced offspring, and the offspring who inherited the lighter skin also survived to reproduce, and so on.
Thus we have variations in the physical characteristics of people – both individual and group characteristics, but they do not represent this thing we call race. As we came to have contact with one another, blending of characteristics occurred. This is not a recent social development.
In summary, biological race is a made-up concept. However, we still “act” like it is real. As we look at children’s developing concepts of their ethnic identity, we must, then, look at how concepts of “race” get woven into this – even though they are not real.
Introduction to Ethnic Identity Development
Ethnic identity refers to the long list of cultural elements and practices that our ancestors passed on to us. Ethnicity is a living representation of our collective identities. Everyone is influenced by the ethnicity or ethnicities into which they are born and raised.
Infants and Toddlers: birth to 2 years
Beginning at birth, ethnic culture is experienced and learned, though not self-consciously, meaning we are not aware that we are learning it. Babies hear the language, smell and taste the foods, see the way people look and interact in their environment. In fact, as a little aside, we’ve discovered that the food a mother eats flavors her breast milk, thereby helping the baby make a successful transition to solid foods. So breast fed babies taste their family’s ethnicity from birth on.
All these aspects of their world (smells and tastes included!) become familiar to them and become part of who they are, as they fit themselves into the social group. Babies have been discovered to even babble with the accent of the language that they hear. For most infants, it is a seamless process. It just happens. So, it makes sense that recognition of one’s own ethnicity or race typically occurs before the correct labeling of others. For the baby, they know who is “like me” and who is not.
Preschoolers: 2-5 years
During the preschool years, ages 2-5, concepts of ethnicity (or race) develop. They develop as children begin to “sort” people by how they look: old or young; male or female; big or little, etc. Thus, they also sort by characteristics that they associate with ethnicity or, so-called, race.
During the preschool years (for children who are sighted), conceptual learning about ethnic differences between people focuses primarily on visual characteristics, such as:
-skin tone
-hair color and texture
-shape of facial features
In and of itself there is nothing wrong with noticing these things about people. They are part of who we are.
The problems come in when we begin to associate values with these superficial characteristics: like thinking that African American (black) people are angry, that European Americans (white) are smarter than other people, and that Mexican American (brown) people are lazy.
School-agers: 6 years +
As children get a little older, they begin to take into consideration what is “inside” the person, like their intentions or behavior, when they are talking about how one person is different from another.
Members of the dominant culture, though, are typically socialized to view their ethnicity (or race) as “normal” or typical. This sense of “white privilege” is learned through observation, experience, and direct teaching. By age 6 years, children of the dominant culture show strong in-group preference, similar to that of dominant culture adults.
How can we get a better understanding of this?
Quintana’s Model
To get some insights, let’s take a look at what one author has described in terms of what children understand about ethnicity and race as they get older. Stephen Quintana described a model he developed in an article entitled “Children’s developmental understanding of ethnicity and race.” His model is grounded in the body of research that had been done to date on how children construct their understandings of race and/or ethnicity.
The model:
· Is based on theories of social perspective-taking, which assumes that the “self” develops within the context of social relationships.
· Can be extended to any racial or ethnic group.
· Is a stage model; he calls the stages “levels” and there are a total of 5.
We’ll take a look at the first two levels that cover the years from 3 to 10.
Level 0 (ages 3-6 years) Integration of affective and perceptual understanding of ethnicity:
Quintana states that “in the development of their racial and ethnic cognition, the key developmental task for young preschool children appears to be the integration of their biological [what people look like] and affective [what emotions I feel about people who look like that] conceptions of race with their perceptions of race in their social environment.” (1998, 33) He says that:
· Attitudes (unconscious or implicit) develop before identification (conscious and explicit) and reflect the wider society’s views.
· In spite of what we tend to think, attitudes developed are unrelated to parents’ explicit attitudes or those of friends, and can change based on circumstances. (They are constructed by the child!)
“During this developmental period, children learn to perceptually differentiate racial and ethnic groups. Moreover, children clearly prefer to base their verbal descriptions and explanations on external and physical manifestations of ethnicity and race.” (34)
Thus, all the unconscious emotional associations that were learned in the first several years of life get associated with visible characteristics of people – either physical characteristics (skin color, hair texture, etc.) or behavioral characteristics (language or accent, clothing, food ways, body movement, etc.).
Level 1 (ages 6-10 years) Literal understanding of ethnicity:
Quintana says that “the transition from level 0 to level 1 in children’s ethnic cognition represents a significant developmental leap. At level 1, which he calls the literal understanding of ethnicity, children’s definitions of ethnicity and race correspond much more closely to definitions commonly used by adults.” (34) Research has found the following characteristics of the thinking of 6-10 year olds on ethnicity:
· Ethnicity is seen as being made up of customs, ancestry, language, and food ways.
· Categorization of the ethnic or racial status of a person becomes more accurate.
· Schemas are still very literal.
· Concrete Operations, however, allows children to consider dual perspectives (such as how a person looks and their personality or behavior characteristics).
Children whose understanding of ethnicity reaches this level have a “tendency to describe and define ethnicity based on nonobservable, inferred characteristics…” as well as express their “awareness of [the] unique, covert [or unseen] lives of individuals.” (36)
Since children have unconscious, emotional, and evaluative associations about characteristics of people which were acquired during infancy and early toddlerhood, these associations, these feelings, will be a part of the information that children will use as they develop their understandings of race and ethnicity.
Introduction to the Development of Bias
Many people who are interested in the early years of life, be it as a parent or as a teacher/caregiver of young children, hold images of the youngest of children as being “innocent” and incapable of having negatively biased conceptions of other people. Furthermore, they see young children as “not noticing” differences between people and accepting everyone. Unfortunately, these concepts of young children are more an expression of what some people might “like” them to be! They do not express the actual nature of children’s construction of knowledge in the early years.
Let’s look at categorization skills in early childhood. Young children, in general, learn that @ differences exist that can be categorized (such as colors, animals, and foods). This is one of the major themes on Sesame Street! Categorization is not, however, limited to colors and foods. @ Young children also learn that people have differences that can be classified or categorized and these are based on perceptual cues – what they look like, sound like, and smell like. @ Finally, young children learn that these differences can have values attached to them. We can like or dislike characteristics, and this brings us to a concept from social psychology, that of attitudes.
Attitudes are systems that we construct which are composed of:
-beliefs about “something” (thoughts)
-feelings about “that thing” (emotions)
-predisposition to respond to “that thing” based on the beliefs and feelings (behavior)
Let’s look at some examples.
If I believe old people are slow, and if I feel frustrated if I am held up or slowed down when I’m trying to get somewhere, then I may run ahead of an old person while on the way to the shortest check-out line in a grocery store!
If I believe that all young African American men are violence prone, and if I fear people who I believe to be violent, I’ll be predisposed to avoid young African American men, and I might cross the street to avoid passing close by two of them coming down the sidewalk.
Because all thoughts have emotions attached to them, children learn the values, feelings, and meanings of all their experiences. They pick up on our responses, and learn them, for better or for worse! This is a key concept in social learning theory. We copy not only the behaviors of those around us, who we see as effective and successful; we copy their feelings too! Some authors call this catching of another’s feelings, “emotional contagion.” So, we are learning or catching attitudes about other people from those who care for us.
Now, particular types of attitudes are referred to as biases. Bias has been studied extensively and we now know a lot of how biases come to be and how we can change them. Let’s take a look at the two basic types of bias.
Two types of bias:
1. Explicit bias is overt behavior intended to do harm to people of some “unfavored” status. It is conscious, meaning that we are aware of the feelings and what it means to us. Telling a Mexican American person an apartment is already rented when it is not is an example of explicit bias.
2. Implicit bias includes stereotyped beliefs and attitudes that people can hold about social groups of any variety. It is mostly unconscious, meaning that these attitudes, these associations are not in our awareness, even though they can and do influence our behavior and choices.
An example of implicit bias could be a parent (who has been inviting various children from their child’s preschool over to play with their child) “never getting around” to calling the family who is Muslim, even though their children play together almost every day at preschool. In this example, the family who is excluded will most likely be fully aware of the biased treatment (through mirror neuron systems).
Through education and increased public awareness, most people have learned to suppress the expression of any explicit biases that they hold. Implicit bias (still alive and well) is more prevalent than explicit bias and can impact our perceptions, our judgments, and our behavior, including who we choose to befriend, and who we hire, so says the research. So, what are some of the influences on the development of the specific negative biases about people who are different from us? Where do children learn these biased associations? Let’s take a look.
Influences:
Children’s observations of other people’s reactions to themselves as well as to other people are a major source of attitudes and associations that we learn in the early years of life. Children also need the opportunity to observe differences in people, so the social environment in which the child is raised will also play a part in what the child learns.
Family members and other caregivers give us our earliest evaluations of others based on their emotional and non-verbal cues. We also pick up on a lot from overheard conversations as young children accompany adults through their everyday tasks. Once we come in contact with peers who are not from our own family or in-group, we also pick up on the evaluations that they have learned.
Product packaging and advertising contains evaluative information about the product or about who should buy it. Web sites for children’s toys are divided between boys’ toys and girls’ toys, and the children shown playing with the toys are typically European American.
Mass media (movies, television) tells us which groups are strong and powerful, and which ones are weak and insignificant by who is put into a particular role. In addition, from a variety of sources (family and friends included), we come across what are called “value laden words.” These are often phrases that contain a “huge” message that is based in stereotypes and negative associations. People often use them without ever reflecting on what they are saying.
Teachers who refer to a group of wiggly and inattentive children as being like a bunch of “wild Indians” are a good example. What does this say about how a teacher views Native Americans? What are the children learning about Native Americans? Singing the counting song, “Ten Little Indians,” equates a people with counting bears.
I want to share one more example which is one that really “blew my mind” as they say. This has to do with the use of pseudo-language, where a person pretends to be speaking another language, but is actually making up the words and having them “sound” like they are in that language. This is incredibly disrespectful and it teaches children that languages other than their own are “gibberish” or without real meaning.
A now-retired Spanish teacher with whom I worked shared this example with me. He went into a local fast-food restaurant one day for lunch and noted that the establishment had put in a salad bar. It featured some Mexican cuisine type ingredients and over top of it there was a sign that called it “Salado Barra.” My friend was shocked as “Salado Barra” (in Spanish) essentially meant “salty brick!” He couldn’t believe it, so he asked to speak to the manager. He told the manager who he was and what the sign said in Spanish, assuming the manager would have it changed immediately! Who wants a salad called salty brick? The manager couldn’t see what the fuss was about, and furthermore, he said he liked the name – he thought it was clever! The sign remained and to this day I wonder just how many people who spoke Spanish actually got a salad there! More seriously, leaving the sign like that perpetuated the biased attitude the manager had about people who do not speak English, that their first language is not a “real” language – with meaning!
During the preschool years a directional set is given to the mind. It is called the process of “selective perception” and it gives attitudes their final form. We see the world through the lenses of what we already know. The following phrase captures this situation:
“I wouldn’t have seen it if I didn’t believe it.”
We usually say the opposite, that I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes! This, instead, says that if I believe something is true, I will reconstruct my perceptions to coincide with my beliefs. If I think that people in wheelchairs are intellectually challenged (rather than motor challenged), then I will question and remember only the times they make an error rather than all the times they were correct. A study done many years ago found that teacher perceptions of how smart their pupils were had a stronger correlation with their overall grades than the students’ I.Q. scores, or level of intelligence.
It is critical that we challenge our unfounded beliefs about groups of people with certain characteristics, or no matter what our intent is, we will inevitably express these non-verbally and pass them on to the children with whom we have contact. On the other hand, this also means that if we could work to reduce our own implicit biases and stereotyped beliefs, we might stop the transmission of these biased notions to the upcoming generations. But, until that happens, we need to look at how the development of prejudice occurs, and it does so in developmental stages.
Developmental stages of prejudice – or, what we see
Birth – 2 years old
Infancy is a time of pre-generalized learning without understanding. It is a “feelings” only type of learning. However, infants do notice physical differences in people. Infants and toddlers learn biased evaluations through implicit learning which is unconscious. They learn what is “me/not me;” and who is in my in-group, and who is not? Infants and toddlers notice physical differences in people and they mimic both adult behavior and feelings. Therefore, if a baby in arms watches their parent have a fear response to particular types of people, they are capable of learning to fear people who look like that.
Preschool years: 3-5
By age 3, there is a development of explicit attitudes as preschoolers have language. Because of this, the preschool years are the best time to help children develop positive feelings about their own and others’ ethnicity through talking about it. Preschoolers who constructively interact on a regular basis with children who are different from them in some way tend to see these differences as falling within their constructed in-group. They stop being an “other.”
By age 3 implicit, unconscious biases are in place. Critical thinking is limited, so it is easy for preschoolers to believe stereotypes.
Middle childhood: 6 years +
-During middle childhood, we begin to see a differentiation of prejudice, which is characterized:
-by it being less total (they exempt certain people)
-by trying to make it more rational and acceptable
-by this applying only to explicit bias; as implicit bias stays steady
Developmental stages of prejudice – or, how does this happen?
Birth to 6:
Research has found evidence that infancy and early childhood are the periods in development during which implicit or unconscious biases and stereotypical associations are put into place. @ The elements that make up these associations are both innate (or “nature” meaning there is a genetic predisposition) as well as learned (or “nurture” meaning it is constructed by the child from their experiences). According to one author, “much of what is learned early in life is preverbal and taught indirectly. These lessons form the foundation on which later learning is built and may also serve as a nonconscious source for related evaluations and actions.” (Rudman 2004, 79)
Babies and young children use social referencing to “read” the parent’s evaluation of individual people or groups of people. Through mirror neurons, the child “feels” what the parent is feeling and the child remembers the association. If a parent holds on to their child a little tighter when they pass by someone who is different from them, the child learns to associate “fear” or “avoidance” with that person and what they look like. They may even generalize these associations to other people who “look like” the original person. These are examples of learning by experience, or “nurture.”
What do we know about “nature’s” role? One of the things we know is that newborns prefer face-like configurations to other patterns that are equally complex, but not face-like. This, in combination with the discovery of a “face recognition area” in the brain, suggests that this preference for faces is innate. “However, infants also prefer to look at the face of and hear the voice of their primary caregiver, prefer the sound of their native language, prefer women’s faces and prefer faces of racial ingroup members” say authors Dunham, Baron and Banaji. “This latter set of preferences is clearly learned; [because] infants whose primary caregivers are male or who are frequently exposed to racial outgroups do not show these normative patterns of preference. Overall, these results indicate the role of both innate proclivities and early experience in shaping preferences.” (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji 2008, 248) Babies prefer who and what is familiar to them.
In addition, the data presented in the article by Dunham, et al., suggest that “implicit intergroup preferences follow a decidedly different pattern” than explicit preferences which develop more slowly. The implicit preferences are] characterized by early emergence of ingroup preference followed by developmental stability.” (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji 2008, 249) These same authors, in an earlier work (2006) found evidence that this pattern was true cross-culturally in young children.
From an evolutionary perspective, we can ask, what would be the advantage of having this implicit in-group preference and having it emerge early? To start with, “humans are among the most social of all primates and success in social interactions is one of the major forces driving our evolution.” (Frith & Frith 2008, 503) In the paper by Dunham, Baron, and Banaji, the authors state that “the implicit [or unconscious] system forms and maintains adultlike intergroup evaluations from early in development.” This ability to quickly evaluate other groups along a good-bad continuum and “to use those evaluations as guides to action is fundamental to an organism’s survival and plausibly forms part of an evolved mechanism to track and monitor social coalitions.” “The early presence of group-based evaluations probably implicates a general system for rapid preference formation, grounded in the evaluative or attitudinal system”, which is processed as implicit memory. (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji 2008, 252) Being built in, this would be “nature.”
By age 4 or 5, racial schemas are well established and these schemas have judgments attached to them.
· By age 5, children have constructed a basic sense of their own ethnic or racial identity and are beginning to explore what that means. A part of their racial schemas includes the categorization of people as being a member of their in-group or a member of an out-group. Children show preference for people who are members of one of their in-groups. In addition, by that time, they are aware of biases based on differences, as by age 3 or 4 many children are already showing discomfort, dislike, or fear toward people who are different from them in terms of race or ethnicity (as well as ability, gender, age, size, etc.).
“Children [who are] from ethnic or racial groups that are socially advantaged (and, hence, dominant) show robust preferences for their ingroup.” In one study, White 6-year-olds in the U.S. showed the same levels of manifested in-group preference as White adults in the U.S. (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji 2008, 249) In this study, White “children as young as three who could successfully categorize by race showed a tendency to be influenced by facial expression such that angry faces were overcategorized as Black, demonstrating a negative association with that group.” (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji 2008, 250)
In another study with a similar finding, Hispanic children as young as age five, and who grew up in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, “showed no preference for their ingroup when compared with the White majority…. Interestingly, these same Hispanic children … did show ingroup preference when comparing their group to Black Americans. This result is noteworthy because it demonstrates that children’s implicit attitudes are sensitive to which of two outgroups (White and Black) is socioculturally advantaged.” (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji 2008, 251) Here we see an example of the co-construction of schemas of race and class in early childhood. This means that young children are not only learning to categorize people by race or ethnicity but also by their apparent social status in the community. It also means they are able to do social comparison – of their group compared to another group.
So, is there a developmental pathway that older children and adults tend to follow in their understandings about race and ethnicity? Dunham, Baron, & Banaji (2006, 1278) in their cross cultural study, found the following trends:
By age 6, we see that:
· implicit bias is robust and stable about both high and low status outgroups; and that a
· general, undifferentiated bias against racial out-groups (both implicit and explicit) exists and is most likely a product of in-group favoritism.
By age 10, we see that:
· implicit bias is stable, but explicit bias is going through an age related decline in strength; and there is
· continued undifferentiated implicit bias against both high and low status outgroups.
By Adulthood, we find that:
· implicit bias is stable;
· implicit bias against high status outgroups has declined; but
· implicit bias against low status outgroups has remained steady; and that
· explicit bias against both high and low status outgroups declines as a function of age, almost disappearing by adulthood.
Dunham, Baron & Banaji (2006) end their article about their research with some final thoughts. I decided to reproduce them here in their entirety.
“The presence of implicit bias in the youngest children tested, the enduring stability of those biases into adulthood, and their presence in a population that rarely encounters racial outgroups, is disconcerting. But perhaps we should not be surprised: Automatic evaluation appears to be a pervasive feature of human cognition, in the social domain and beyond. And despite the disconcerting nature of these findings, overcoming them requires first understanding them for what they are. As Richard Dawkins wrote about our genetic predispositions in 1976, ‘Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.’
“Adopting a similar tact, Dovidio and colleagues, for example, suggest the possibility of actually recruiting these automatic effects to reduce bias: If intergroup bias is an automatic feature of human social categorization, fostering the creation of more inclusive in-groups that cut across the usually divisive lines of race and gender could make a virtue of what first appears a vice.
“In adult social cognition, the investigation of implicit attitudes has provided a richer understanding of social bias and intergroup relations, yielding new insights into the causes and consequences of everyday prejudice and discrimination. Even the best intentioned among us are sometimes guilty of such behavior, and the striking divergence of implicit and explicit attitudes in middle childhood should remind us of where we began: Children are presented with deeply contradictory information about the meaning and importance of race, are at once exposed to repeated negative stereotypes and explicit exhortations against that negativity. The widening gap between implicit and explicit forms of bias may be the unsurprising consequence of that division.” (2006, 1279-1280)
Conclusion: Counteracting Bias
Let’s end on a positive note about bias by looking at how we can reduce it. What the brain can learn, the brain can re-learn in a new way. Our brains are very plastic, well into adulthood; you are never too old to change how you think and see the world!
So, what do we know so far about reducing implicit bias in particular?
1. People with a strong motivation to be unprejudiced tend to hold less implicit bias. So, if your values include a strong anti-bias approach, your implicit biases will tend to reduce over time.
2. We can train ourselves away from bias. Biases and stereotypes are learned through associational learning and reinforcement, so we can actually learn a new association; we can reinforce new meanings.
· What you have to do first is admit that you hold implicit biases that you probably learned in childhood.
· Next, you need to find out what the biases are, or what it IS about a group or characteristic of people that you learned. I’ll give you a resource to use for this in a minute.
· Then, based on what you find out, come up with a counter-stereotype to the biased notion. Try to be as specific as possible. The more specific, the better it works.
· Finally, say this counter-stereotype to yourself whenever you see or interact with someone of that group or with that characteristic.
In the original study that came up with this approach, they recruited people who held an implicit fear of African Americans (especially men).[1] They asked them to say the counter-stereotype “safe” internally to themselves every time they saw or interacted with an African American person. The technique worked to reduce the implicit bias they had toward African Americans. In fact, just deciding to do this began to reduce their implicit bias.
Implicit Bias Test:
To find out more about yourself and specific biases you might have learned (most likely) in childhood, you can take implicit bias tests at: www.implicit.harvard.edu. They have tests for a lot of groups and categories of people. You get feedback on the bias which will help you come up with a counter-stereotype to use to reduce the bias.
Let me end with a personal example on how I have done this. Not too long ago, my husband had to have his “other” hip replaced. About three weeks after the surgery, on a Monday, he accidently dislocated it which was an even bigger deal than just getting it replaced. It meant that I needed to stay at home with him for a week, and I was teaching 15 credits of face to face classes, five days a week. I had to transfer lectures into written format and put them on our class shell, take care of my husband who could not do anything by himself, and do all the other stuff of life on top of that! By Saturday, I was totally stressed out. My husband was asleep and I was working on a lecture similar to this one and was reminded that there was a study that found that when people are very stressed, their implicit biases get exaggerated. So, I went to the computer and started taking implicit bias tests. I took the one for Asian Americans and the test indicated a strong bias of not seeing Asian Americans as citizens!! I sat there and thought about how I could have learned that, and it only took a moment. I was born in May of 1945, at the end of World War II. The United States was at war with Japan.
During this period there was a lot of war propaganda produced for the U.S. government and much of it was in the form of cartoons. My parents bought an early television, and as a child I saw a lot of “old” cartoons, many of which were from WWII. They depicted Japanese people and particularly Japanese soldiers in the most highly stereotyped and negative manner. I learned stereotypes about Japanese people in particular and Asians in general. The messages of these cartoons were reinforced, I’m guessing, by my parents who had siblings and friends fighting in both Europe and the Pacific.
In response to finding this out, I came up with a counter-stereotype, “valued citizen,” which I say to myself whenever seeing or interacting with a person who is Asian American. I will continue to work on this and then take the test again to see how I’m doing!
We can change, and with the changes we can make, we reduce the possibilities that we will pass on biases to the next generations. I encourage you to give it a try yourself. The rewards are greater than just for you.
Sources:
Dunham, Y., Baron, A.S., & Banaji, M.R. (2006). From American city to Japanese Village: A cross-cultural investigation of implicit race attitudes. Child Development, 77, 1268-1281.
Dunham, Y., Baron, A.S., & Banaji, M.R. (2008). The development of implicit intergroup cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 248-253. doi:10.1016/j.tics.208.04.006
Frith, C.D. & Frith, U. (2008). Implicit and explicit processes in social cognition. Neuron, 60, 503-510. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2008.10.032
Rudman, L.A. (2004). Sources of implicit attitudes. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 13, 79-82.
Quintana, S.M. (1998). Children’s developmental understanding of ethnicity and race. Applied & Preventive Psychology. 7, 27-45.
2012
[1] Level of implicit bias was determined through the use of the Implicit Bias Test as well as fMRI measurements of amygdala activation, indicating a fear response.
