1 Department of Psychology.
2 Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington.
Psychol Sci. 2017 Feb;28(2):216-224. doi: 10.1177/0956797616678930. Epub 2016 Dec 21.
Identifying the origins of social bias is critical to devising strategies to overcome prejudice. In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that young children can catch novel social biases from brief exposure to biased nonverbal signals demonstrated by adults. Our results are consistent with this hypothesis. In Experiment 1, we found that children who were exposed to a brief video depicting nonverbal bias in favor of one individual over another subsequently explicitly preferred, and were more prone to behave prosocially toward, the target of positive nonverbal signals. Moreover, in Experiment 2, preschoolers generalized such bias to other individuals. The spread of bias observed in these experiments lays a critical foundation for understanding the way that social biases may develop and spread early in childhood.
确定社会偏见的起源对于制定克服偏见的策略至关重要。在两项实验中，我们检验了这样一个假设，即年幼的孩子可以通过短暂接触成年人表现出的带有偏见的非言语信号来捕捉新的社会偏见。我们的结果支持了这一假设。在实验 1 中，我们发现，接触过一段短暂视频的儿童，该视频描绘了非言语偏向于一个人而不是另一个人，随后他们会明确地更喜欢、也更倾向于对积极非言语信号的目标做出亲社会行为。此外，在实验 2 中，学龄前儿童将这种偏见推广到了其他个体身上。在这些实验中观察到的偏见传播为理解社会偏见在儿童早期是如何发展和传播的奠定了关键基础。
