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Babies Renounce Racial Profiling
“They all look the same to me.” It’s a rude way to describe our difficulty in telling people of other races apart. But the “other-race effect” is real, and it goes both ways. Many white people have trouble telling the difference between Asian faces, and vice versa.
The phenomenon is primarily a result of perceptual learning, not racism per se (although one study has found a correlation between the magnitude of the other-race effect and level of implicit prejudice). That’s because it’s pragmatic to see meaningful differences, and ignore irrelevant details. If everyone had black hair, we would never pay attention to such redundant information to distinguish people; similarly we do not pay attention to differences between types of faces that we rarely see. It’s a skill (or lack thereof) that we pick up as babies, and psychologists have been studying how it works for decades.
Perception develops in the first year of life together with experience, based on the types of faces we first see. Of course most of us do not regularly encounter monkeys at this tender age. However, a recent study showed that babies could tell individual monkey faces apart better than those of other ethnicities and threw psychologists for a loop; no matter which way you slice it the result was just plain weird.
Studying what babies perceive is hard because, unlike adults, they cannot tell you what they are thinking (but at least they don’t lie). Thus, testing babies relies on more implicit measures of their level of interest. In typical studies, babies are shown one face until they get bored with it, and then they are shown the same face again, side-by-side with a different face. If they can tell the difference they should look more at the new face, since their attention is drawn to novelty. But if the babies can’t tell the difference, they’d probably look equally at both faces.
A first study found that infants can tell the difference between human faces, both of their own race and other races, when they are three months old. But by six months, they learn to dismiss the facial differences between other races.
Olivier Pascalis, a psychologist at the University of Sheffield, wondered whether the same was true when it came to faces other species. So he and his colleagues tested babies’ perception of monkeys back in 2002. They found that very young babies could tell the difference between monkey faces, just like they could with humans; they lost this ability at nine months - a whole three months later than when they stopped detecting other-race differences. Were babies at six months were able to tell monkey faces apart better than those of other ethnicities?
These results were counterintuitive and slightly insulting (was Kanzi really more distinguishable than the cast of Fresh Prince to a kid from rural Japan??). They were also problematic for current theories of perceptual development, and for common sense, which would dictate that other-race human faces should be more similar to same-race faces than monkey faces.
Luckily, Pascalis, his student Dave Kelly, and their colleagues redid the other-race study and presented their results last summer at the International Conference on Infant Studies in Kyoto, Japan. This time they used colour photos instead of black and white ones (used in the first study) and found that the six month-olds successfully recognized the difference between other-race faces, just like they could in monkeys.
So it now looks like changes in ethnic and species face perception follow similar timelines. Face perception changes from a very young age so that we distinguish only the differences that are most meaningful in our environment so that everything else looks, well, the same.
p.s.
If you live in the Vancouver area and are interested in participating in psychological research with your child, contact the Early Development Research Group.
