“Children do learn what they live. Then they grow up to live what they’ve learned.”
-Dorothy Nolte

A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology proposed that children can inherit adults’ biases towards other groups by observing their nonverbal signals towards those groups.

The study was conducted by Dr. Allison Skinner from Northwestern University, and Dr. Kristina Olson and Dr. Andrew Meltzoff from the University of Washington.

Children learn much of what they know about the world by observing how the people around them behave. This observational learning extends to what they know about people, too – children as young as 5-years old have been found to base their judgements of other children on a teacher’s subtle behaviors towards them.

In line with these findings, Drs. Skinner, Meltzoff, and Olsen have shown that preschool children acquire a preference for individuals who have received positive nonverbal cues from an adult. This preference even extended to another person whom children were told was the first individual’s best friend.

It is possible, they reason, that these positive biases can transfer to other group members through a process called evaluative conditioning in which neutral stimuli become positively evaluated through their repeated associations with other positively evaluated stimuli. For instance, children have been found to prefer unknown cartoon characters that were repeatedly paired with liked animals over ones paired with disliked animals.

Building on this research, in the current study the researchers hypothesized that children who view a member of another group receiving more positive nonverbal signals from an adult would acquire a positive bias towards that individual and other members of their group.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers recruited 110 children from 4- to-5-years old to participate in their experiment. These children were shown two groups of adults on a computer monitor – one group wearing dark red shirts, the other wearing black shirts. They were then shown a video of two adult ‘expressers’ (wearing neutral-colored orange and white shirts, respectively) both displaying positive nonverbal signals (e.g., smiling, leaning in) towards a target member of one group and negative nonverbal signals (e.g., scowling, leaning away) towards a target member of the other group.

To assess positive bias towards individual group members, the children were asked to point to a still image of which of the two target group members they liked best and asked which they would prefer to give a stuffed toy to. They were also shown a video in which both target group members picked up a nonsense object (i.e., a wooden block with holes in it) and labelling it either a “snegg” or a “hoon”. Children were then shown the object and asked whether they thought it was a snegg or a hoon.

To assess positive bias towards the groups more generally, the children were asked to point to the image of the group they liked best, and which group they would prefer a new interaction partner to come from. They were also shown videos of a member from each group (different from the targets) interacting with a different nonsense object in two different ways. They were then given the same object from the video and asked how to use it.

In support of their hypothesis, the researchers found that, across all tasks, children showed preferences for both individual targets and their groups when the targets received positive nonverbal cues at a rate significantly greater than chance.

In a second study, the researchers wanted to see if the positive bias children acquired would extend to larger social groups. To examine this, they recruited 111 different children and had them participate in a modified version of the first experiment.

This time, children were shown images of 16 people superimposed on pictures of one of two different fictional locations. Red-shirt group members were said to be residents of a place called “Redvale”, and black-shirt group members were said to be residents of “Blackpine”. They were then shown the same video of the adult ‘expressers’ from the first study.

Again, children were found to pick up on adults’ non-verbal expressions of preference, and this time, to display their own positive bias towards other members from that same fictional geographical region.

The results from these experiments demonstrate just how pernicious group biases can be. Even subtle nonverbal cues communicate group preferences, and children learn from these cues to develop their own perceptions of the world.