Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, USA.
Department of Psychology, Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania, USA.
Dev Sci. 2022 Mar;25(2):e13175. doi: 10.1111/desc.13175. Epub 2021 Sep 16.
From early in development, race biases how children think about gender-often in a manner that treats Black women as less typical and representative of women in general than White or Asian women. The present study (N = 89, ages 7-11; predominately Hispanic, White, and multi-racial children) examined the generalizability of this phenomenon across middle childhood and the mechanisms underlying variability in its development. Replicating prior work, children were slower and less accurate to categorize the gender of Black women compared to Asian or White women, as well as compared to Black men, suggesting that children perceived Black women as less representative of their gender. These effects were robust across age within a racially and ethnically diverse sample of children. Children's tendencies to view their own racial identities as expansive and flexible, however, attenuated these effects: Children with more flexible racial identities also had gender concepts that were more inclusive of Black women. In contrast, the tendency for race to bias children's gender representations was unrelated to children's multiple classification skill and racial essentialism. These findings shed light on the mechanisms underlying variation in how race biases gender across development, with critical implications for how children's own identities shape the development of intergroup cognition and behavior.
从早期发展开始，种族偏见就影响了孩子们对性别的看法——这种偏见通常认为黑人女性不如白人和亚裔女性那样具有代表性。本研究（N=89，年龄 7-11 岁；主要为西班牙裔、白人和多种族儿童）考察了这一现象在整个童年期的普遍性，以及其发展变化的潜在机制。研究结果与先前的研究一致，与白人和亚裔女性以及黑男性相比，儿童对黑人女性的性别分类更慢且更不准确，这表明儿童认为黑人女性在性别方面的代表性较低。在一个种族和民族多样化的儿童样本中，这些影响在整个年龄段内都是稳定的。然而，儿童对自己的种族身份持开放和灵活的态度，减弱了这些影响：种族身份更灵活的儿童的性别观念也更包容黑人女性。相比之下，种族影响儿童性别代表性的倾向与儿童的多重分类技能和种族本质主义无关。这些发现揭示了种族偏见如何影响儿童性别认知发展的潜在机制，对于儿童自身身份如何影响群体间认知和行为的发展具有重要意义。
