{"id":4079,"date":"2013-03-19T05:43:44","date_gmt":"2013-03-19T05:43:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=4079"},"modified":"2013-03-19T05:43:44","modified_gmt":"2013-03-19T05:43:44","slug":"are-babies-bigoted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=4079","title":{"rendered":"Are Babies Bigoted?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In one of the fastest-growing<\/a> areas in psychology, researchers are gaining\u00a0insight into the mental processes of subjects that are barely able to\u00a0communicate: babies.\u00a0In recent years, innovative and playful experimental setups have\u00a0suggested\u00a0that infants as young as six months old have a sense of morality and fairness, and that\u00a018-month-olds are capable of altruistically helping others.<\/p>\n

Some of this research, though, has also shed light on racial preferences. A new study published in\u00a0Psychological\u00a0Science<\/em><\/a>\u00a0suggests that 9- to 14-month-olds exhibit a preference for their own \u2014 in watching a puppet show, at least, they seem to prefer their\u00a0own kind, and support puppets that pick on those who are different from\u00a0them.<\/wbr><\/p>\n

Because babies can\u2019t communicate verbally,\u00a0J. Kiley Hamlin<\/a>\u00a0of the University of British Columbia\u00a0has pioneered the use of\u00a0puppet shows to probe their psychology and better\u00a0understand how they see the world. In this study, her research team put on\u00a0an show in which 52 infant participants were led to identify themselves\u00a0as similar to one of the characters in the show and different from the\u00a0other.<\/p>\n

To accomplish this, the researchers started off by asking the infants to pick\u00a0a food, either graham crackers or green beans (a little surprisingly, a full 42\u00a0percent chose the vegetables). Then, the infants were shown a pair of rabbit\u00a0puppets, one who liked graham crackers and one who liked green beans:<\/p>\n

Once they\u2019d solidly demonstrated each rabbit\u2019s choice, one of them \u2014 either the\u00a0one with the same preference as the infant observer, or the one with an opposite preference \u2014 would be randomly chosen to encounter\u00a0a pair of new characters:\u00a0one dog, termed a \u201chelper,\u201d and another, called a \u201charmer.\u201d As the rabbit played\u00a0with a ball and dropped it, the nice \u201chelper\u201d dog threw it back, but the mean\u00a0\u201charmer\u201d dog (below) held onto the ball:<\/p>\n

After both of the scenes were over, both dogs were presented to the infant,\u00a0and the particular dog that the baby first reached for was interpreted as the character it preferred.<\/p>\n

The results were a bit startling: When the infants had watched a play involving a rabbit with a food choice that matched theirs, 83 percent preferred the \u201chelper\u201d dog. When they\u2019d watched a play with a rabbit who liked a different\u00a0food, 88 percent chose the \u201charmer\u201d dog. This held true regardless of the\u00a0 babies\u2019 original food choices \u2014 the only thing that mattered was whether the rabbit\u2019s identity, it terms of food choice, matched their own.<\/p>\n

To further parse the motivations underlying the infants\u2019 choices, the\u00a0 researchers conducted a similar experiment that involved a neutral dog that\u00a0neither help nor harmed the rabbit.<\/p>\n

In this part of the study, the older\u00a0infants\u2019 preferences revealed that when watching rabbits who had different favorite foods than them,\u00a0they not only liked \u201charmer\u201d dogs more than\u00a0neutral dogs, but strongly preferred even neutral dogs when compared to\u00a0\u201chelpers\u201d (this was true among the 14-month-olds, but not the\u00a0 9-month-olds).\u00a0In other words, it seemed that they not only wanted to see\u00a0the rabbit treated poorly, but also would rather see it treated\u00a0neutrally than get some help.<\/p>\n

Of course, when designing experiments for subjects that can\u2019t use words to\u00a0communicate, the simplest of variables could potentially throw off the results.\u00a0It\u2019s unclear, for example, if the researchers alternated which side the \u201chelper\u201d\u00a0and \u201charmer\u201d puppets appeared on, so the babies could have been influenced by\u00a0their emerging sense of handedness.<\/p>\n

In the past, critics of such puppet show experiments have also charged that a baby merely reaching for one puppet or\u00a0another might be an impulsive reflex, rather than reflecting an underlying moral judgment.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s clear, though, is that this experiment demonstrated a consistent\u00a0reflex across the babies tested. While extrapolating this to mean that the babies are\u00a0racist or bigoted is probably a step too far \u2014 for one, they were\u00a0 merely considering individual puppets, not groups of puppets with similar\u00a0 characteristics \u2014 it does raise interesting questions about\u00a0the origins of\u00a0xenophobia in an individual\u2019s lifetime. – Smithsonian.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In one of the fastest-growing areas in psychology, researchers are gaining\u00a0insight into the mental processes of subjects that are barely able to\u00a0communicate: babies.\u00a0In recent years, innovative and playful experimental setups have\u00a0suggested\u00a0that infants as young as six months old have a sense of morality and fairness, and that\u00a018-month-olds are capable of altruistically helping others. Some of … Continue reading “Are Babies Bigoted?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4080,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10,123],"tags":[2618,806],"class_list":["post-4079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","category-world","tag-psychology","tag-racial-preferences"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/nordicbaby.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4079"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4082,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079\/revisions\/4082"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}