autoreview, Bureaucrats, editor, reviewer, Administrators
295
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
m
no edit summary
[[Category: Under construction]]
==New Research Finds a Way to Reverse Children’s Racial Stereotyping <ref>http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-08-reverse-children-racial-stereotyping.html cited in http://www.amren.com/news/2015/08/new-research-finds-a-way-to-reverse-childrens-racial-stereotyping/</ref>==
{{Racists Say}} It's pretty amazing. They're basically admitting that racial awareness is innate and not learned from 'racist parents'. Then they go on to develop brainwashing techniques to counteract nature. <ref>http://www.amren.com/news/2015/08/new-research-finds-a-way-to-reverse-childrens-racial-stereotyping/#comment-2217272682</ref>
{{BQ}}
Using an established technique of measuring how much time the babies spend looking at pictures of faces, Quinn has learned that 3-month-olds begin showing a visual preference for the categories–generally, female and the same race as themselves–that they see most often in their daily lives.
By 9 months of age, infants not only distinguish racial categories but also become less able to tell different individuals apart if they are members of a less-familiar race. For example, Caucasian infants can identify Caucasian faces as belonging to different individuals, but they are less likely to see Asian or African faces as distinct individuals.
“Our original thinking about the 9-month-old findings was that this process that we call ‘narrowing’ is based on visual perception, not any social bias,” Quinn said. “But then the question we asked was: Might these perceptual biases we see in infants be related to the social biases that we see in older kids, beginning at 3 or 4 years of age, and adults?
“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 this new study, published in July in the journal Developmental Science, Quinn and his collaborators in China used photos of African and Asian faces and morphed them together to create ambiguous images that looked equally African and Asian. Some of the faces had pleasant expressions, while others looked more severe.
When researchers showed the images to 4- to 6-year-olds in China, the children identified the happy faces as Asian–the category they were used to seeing–and the angry faces as African, a group they rarely saw in daily life.
The scientists’ next step was to see whether the children’s unconscious racial biases could be disrupted. They showed the youngsters five different African faces and gave each of the individuals a name, repeating the process until the children could identify each of the five faces by name.
When the children then looked at the happy and angry ambiguous-race photos again, their bias in favor of their own racial group had dropped significantly.
“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.”
Many questions remain for further study, he said. Among them: After children go through the face-identification exercise and reduce their unconscious bias, how long does that effect last? Also, what aspect of the training is the critical ingredient? Is it mere exposure, or is it the act of individuation?
“This has caused us to rethink what’s going on” in the link between perception and social bias, Quinn said. “There are a number of avenues we want to explore.”
{{BQ/}}
