Girls and women face persistent negative stereotyping within STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). This field intervention was designed to improve boys' perceptions of girls' STEM ability. Boys (N = 667; mostly White and East Asian) aged 9-15 years in Canadian STEM summer camps (2017-2019) had an intervention or control conversation with trained camp staff.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the current research we examined non-Black children's associations with targets who differed by both race and gender, with a focus on the role of categorization in informing children's biases. Children aged 5 to 12 years ( = 206; 109 boys, 97 girls; 55% White; 68% of household incomes > $75,000/year), recruited from a science museum in a large multicultural Canadian city, completed a child-friendly Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al., 2003) that included own-gender Black and other-gender White targets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: The goal of the current research was to gain an understanding of people's mental representations of an apologetic face. In Study 1, participants' responses were used to generate visual templates of apologetic faces through reverse correlation (Study 1a, = 121), and a new set of participants (Study 1b, = 37 and 1c, = 153) rated that image (group-level Classification Image, CI), as well as either the inverse image (group-level anti-CI in Study 1b) or base face (in Study 1c), on apology-related characteristics. Results demonstrated that people have a mental representation of an apologetic face, and that sadness is an important feature of this template.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Women continue to be underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and research suggests that academic-gender stereotypes can be a contributing factor. In the present research, we examined whether adolescent daughters' and their parents' gender stereotypes about math and liberal arts would predict the academic orientation of daughters at a critical time of career related decision-making.
Methods: Participants included girls in late adolescence (N = 185, M 17) and at least one parent (N = 230, M 49), resulting in 147 mother-daughter dyads and 83 father-daughter dyads.
Across three studies, we examined non-Black children's spontaneous associations with targets who differed by both race and emotional expression. Children aged 5 to 10 years (N = 419; 215 girls; 58% White; 65% of household incomes >$75,000/year) completed Implicit Association Tests (IAT; Greenwald et al., 2003) containing smiling Black and neutral White target faces.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearch suggests that exposure to stories about Black adults who are contributing positively to their community can reduce implicit pro-White/anti-Black racial bias in older children (ages 9-12). The aim of the current research was to replicate and extend this finding by investigating whether a different child-friendly manipulation exposing children to positive Black exemplars and negative White exemplars could decrease implicit pro-White/anti-Black racial bias in children aged 5 to 12 years, both immediately following the intervention and 1 hr later. In addition, a second aim of this research was to examine whether child-friendly positive exemplar exposure would similarly reduce adults' implicit racial bias.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is mounting evidence that North Americans are better able to remember faces of targets who belong to the same social group, and this is true even when the social groups are experimentally created. Yet, how Western cultural contexts afford the development of this own group face recognition bias remains unknown. This question is particularly important given that recent findings suggest that first-generation East Asian Canadians do not show this bias.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInitial theory and research examining children's implicit racial attitudes suggest that an implicit preference favoring socially advantaged groups emerges early in childhood and remains stable across development (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji, 2008). In two studies, we examined the ubiquity of this theory by measuring non-Black minority and non-White majority children's implicit racial attitudes toward White and Black racial outgroups in two distinct cultural contexts. In Study 1, non-Black minority children in an urban North American community with a large Black population showed an implicit pro-White (versus Black) bias in early childhood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe goal of this research was to examine children's implicit racial attitudes. Across three studies, a total of 359 White 5- to 12-year-olds completed child-friendly exemplar (Affective Priming Task; Affect Misattribution Procedure) and category-based (Implicit Association Test) implicit measures of racial attitudes. Younger children (5- to 8-year-olds) showed automatic ingroup positivity toward White child exemplars, whereas older children (9- to 12-year-olds) did not.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Psychol
October 2016
Implicit attitudes are evaluations that are made automatically, unconsciously, unintentionally, or without conscious and deliberative processing (Nosek et al., 2007; Gawronski and De Houwer, 2014). For the last two decades implicit measures have been developed and used to assess people's attitudes and social cognition, with the most widely used measure being the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudies with adults suggest that implicit preferences favoring White versus Black individuals can be reduced through exposure to positive Black exemplars. However, it remains unclear whether developmental differences exist in the capacity for these biases to be changed. This study included 369 children and examined whether their implicit racial bias would be reduced following exposure to positive Black exemplars.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ability to discriminate visually based on race emerges early in infancy: 3-month-olds can perceptually differentiate faces by race and 6-month-olds can perceptually categorize faces by race. Between ages 6 and 8 years, children can sort others into racial groups. But to what extent are these abilities influenced by context? In this article, we review studies on children's racial categorization and discuss how our conclusions are affected by how we ask the questions (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent theory suggests that face recognition accuracy is affected by people's motivations, with people being particularly motivated to remember ingroup versus outgroup faces. In the current research we suggest that those higher in interdependence should have a greater motivation to remember ingroup faces, but this should depend on how ingroups are defined. To examine this possibility, we used a joint individual difference and cultural approach to test (a) whether individual differences in interdependence would predict face recognition accuracy, and (b) whether this effect would be moderated by culture.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this study we examined the influence of normative body ideals in the form of perceived peer preferences on personal body ideals and body dissatisfaction Participants (N=146 female college students) were exposed to the purported preferences of peers representing either relatively thin or heavy body ideals. Along with the normative body ideal manipulation, the gender of the purported peers was manipulated. Participants then selected their ideal for their own body and body dissatisfaction was measured.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn 4 studies, the authors examined the effect of approaching Blacks on implicit racial attitudes and immediacy behaviors. In Studies 1-3, participants were trained to pull a joystick toward themselves or to push it away from themselves when presented with photographs of Blacks, Whites, or Asians before completing an Implicit Association Test to measure racial bias. In Study 4, the effect of this training procedure on nonverbal behavior in an interracial contact situation was investigated.
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