Children’s Use of Race in Their Social Judgments: A Multi-Site, Multi-Racial Group Comparison

Studies assessing children’s use of race in social judgment have often focused on White participants and usually include targets of only one or two racial backgrounds. They have also employed a wide range of methods, making comparisons across studies difficult. In this paper, we recruited a large sample of children ages 4- to 6-years-old (N = 666) belonging to the United States’ four largest racial/ethnic groups (Black, Latine, Asian, and White) in five geographic regions (Durham, NC; Honolulu, HI; Long Beach, CA; New Haven, CT; Seattle, WA) to broadly examine children’s race-based social judgments (including measures of racial attitudes, interpersonal distance, resource allocation, and status perception). Overall, children demonstrated consistent ingroup biases in the attitudes, resource allocation, and interpersonal distance measures, but did not systematically associate their ingroup with higher status. When analyzed separately by participant race, White children tended to show these effects at above chance rates, sometimes significantly more than children in other racial groups. Results for Black, Latine, and Asian children were more variable across measures.