Development of Racial Essentialism in Early Childhood

To analyze the development and nature of essentialist beliefs about race in earlychildhood, we replicated Mandalaywala and colleagues’ original study on the topic, in which a “switched-at-birth” task was used to test participants’ beliefs about the heritability of skin color and behavioral/psychological traits. We accessed their data through OSF and implemented quasibinomial and linear regression models using RStudio. As an extension to the original study, models were modified to incorporate participant sex as a variable. Overall, children judged skin color to be more heritable when the race of the birth mother was white but neither participant race nor sex was a strong predictor of general beliefs about the heritability of skin color. As expected, greater outgroup exposure was associated with a decrease in racial essentialism. Additionally, we found that Black participants exhibited higher levels of racial essentialism, and both Black participants and female participants displayed greater warmth toward Blacks. Despite children viewing skin color as a highly heritable factor, they do not hold strong causal essentialist beliefs of race, and these beliefs are further affected by the level of outgroup exposure that participants experience. Upon extending this model to compare across participant sexes, the results suggest that emotion-based judgments such as warmth toward Blacks differ more greatly between sexes, while general essentialist beliefs were not as differentiable. Essentialist beliefs may form more on the basis of intellectual development, in which there is a minimal distinction between males and females, rather than emotional experiences. The reason for certain variations across participant sex is hard to pinpoint but all in all, sex was not a significant determining factor in developing essentialist beliefs about race in children