Reducing Implicit and Explicit Racial Biases among Young Children

Racial biases exist in our society. These biases, when left unchecked, exert far-reaching adverse impacts at personal and societal levels in education, health care, employment, and justice. The preschool period is formative in the development of racial bias. Until the present thesis, it was unknown whether children at preschool-age would display racial biases against other-race people, and if yes, how to reduce them. In Chapter 2, I developed a child-friendly implicit racial bias test and found the early emergence of implicit and explicit racial biases among children as young as 3-years old. The same pattern was consistently found in three distinct cultures: China, Cameroon, and Canada. I also found that the level of racial bias was affected by perceived social status between own- vs. other-race and their level of contact with other-race members. It was the first set of studies that examine the phenomenon of racial bias in preschool-age children from various cultures. In Chapter 3, I developed a novel training method, referred to as individuation training, in which children practiced the process of treating other-race members as unique individuals rather than members of social groups. I provided the evidence that individuation training reduced implicit racial biases among children in China (Experiment 1) and Canada (Experiment 2), and that the training effects were sensitive to children’s exposure to racial diversity. In Chapter 4, I further examined the long-term effects of the novel individuation training method. I found that repeated individuation training reduced Chinese children’s implicit racial bias for the long term (60 days). Together, my thesis suggests that racial bias emerges early in preschool-age and training children to treat other-race members as unique individuals reduce implicit racial bias in both short and long terms.Ph.D