Affect Misattribution in Implicit Reactions toward Children (2009)

Undergraduate: Megan Bookhout

Faculty Advisor: Keith Payne
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Previous research on implicit testing has demonstrated that adults often are implicitly biased toward Black adults. Little work has been done looking at whether the same biases appear toward Black children. The current study sought to investigate at what point in children’s development implicit biases against them begin to emerge. I hypothesized that Black children would begin to be judged as more aggressive than White children both explicitly and implicitly beginning in adolescence, and that Black and White children would be judged equally in intelligence explicitly across the age spectrum, yet a pro-White bias would appear for all ages in implicit testing. Using a computer test, 33 participants looked at images of 80 Black and White, male and female children, in four age groups (toddler, elementary school age, adolescent, young adult), and answered explicit questionnaires as well as completed an implicit test designed to test their attitudes regarding the two specific traits. Results showed that Blacks were overall judged implicitly to be more aggressive than Whites, though that did not differ much on the basis of age. Explicit judgments of aggression differed between Black and White children, with Black toddlers, elementary aged children, and adolescents rated as more aggressive. For explicit and implicit ratings of intelligence, race was significant only in the adolescent age group, with Whites rated as more intelligent than Blacks.