Before continuing, please read Part 1 of this article.

Since people are usually not aware of their nonverbal behavior, nonverbal bias is a common feature of everyday life. As a result, families and friends routinely teach children racial and ethnic preferences without intending to. These biases are also taught through the mass media. A 2009 series of studies by Max Weisbuch and his colleagues, done with college students, demonstrates the teaching of implicit racial bias by television.

These researchers recorded 90 10-sec segments from 11 popular television programs in which White characters interacted with either White or Black targets. The clips were edited to eliminate the soundtrack and to mask the White or Black target to whom the character was talking. Twenty-three judges rated how positively the targets were treated. The (unseen) White targets were perceived as being treated more favorably than the (unseen) Black targets. This study established the existence of nonverbal racial bias on television. It seems unlikely that the actors and directors of these programs were aware that they were transmitting bias. These 11 shows had an average weekly audience of 9 million people.

The remaining studies were designed to test whether nonverbal race bias affects the viewer. In the second study, the 11 programs in Study 1 were scored according to the amount of race bias in the clips. The participants were asked which of these programs they watched regularly. It was found that watchers of the more biased programs showed a greater preference for Whites on the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a standard measure of implicit racial bias. (See this previous post for an explanation of the IAT.)

Since this is a correlational study, it does not demonstrate that exposure to biased programs causes prejudiced attitudes. An alternative explanation is that viewers prefer TV programs that reinforce their pre-existing attitudes. The remaining two studies, however, were true experiments in which participants were randomly assigned to be exposed to different televised content.

In these two experiments, participants were shown one of two silent videos constructed from clips used in Study 1. The pro-White tape featured White targets receiving positive nonverbal signals and Black targets being treated more negatively. The pro-Black tape featured favorable treatment of Black targets and unfavorable treatment of Whites. The participants were then tested for implicit racial bias. In Study 3, the IAT was used as the measure of bias. As expected, those who had seen the pro-White video showed a greater preference for Whites than those who had seen the pro-Black video.

Study 4 involved a different measure of implicit racial bias, an affective priming task. This task measures whether subliminal exposure to photos of White and Black faces speeds up the recognition of positive or negative images. Subliminal means below the level of awareness. Photos are presented on a computer so quickly that they are not consciously perceived. Nevertheless, they influence behavior. The premise, well established through previous research, is that you respond more quickly to an image if it is preceded by another that elicits a similar emotional response. Therefore, if you are subliminally exposed to a photo of a liked person, you can recognize a positive object, i.e., a puppy, more quickly, while exposure to a disliked person allows you to identify a negative object, i.e., a rattlesnake, more quickly.

This experiment was strengthened by some additional controls not present in Study 3. In addition to pro-White and pro-Black videos, there was a race-neutral control video. Photos of White, Black and Asian-Americans were used as subliminal primes. The results are shown below.

A higher number on the vertical axis indicates a faster response to that prime. The people who had seen the pro-White video showed faster positive associations to White faces (compared to Black faces), while those who had seen the pro-Black video showed faster positive associations to Black faces (compared to White faces). The control video had the same effect on both Black and White associations. Asian faces had no priming effect.

The studies cited in these posts make it clear that we don’t have to be explicitly taught to like or dislike members of different racial or ethnic groups. Our social environment contains nonverbal cues which encourage the reproduction of prejudice and discrimination from one generation to the next.

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You may be surprised to hear that White children show evidence of bias against African-Americans as early as age 3. How does this happen? Since there is evidence that the implicit biases of adults leak out through their nonverbal behavior, it seems reasonable that children pick up these cues from their parents and older acquaintances. A new study by Allison Skinner and her colleagues shows how exposure to positive or negative nonverbal cues can create social biases in preschool children. The studies are simple, but they are awkward to explain, so please bear with me.

In the first experiment, 67 4- and 5-year-old pre-school children watched a video in which two adult female actors each exhibited nonverbal bias toward two adult female targets. The targets were idenified by the colors of their shirts, red or black. Although the actors used exactly the same scripts when talking to the two targets, one target received positive nonverbal signals (i.e., smiling, warm tone of voice, leaning in) and the other received negative signals (scowling, cold tone, leaning away). Since these were two different women, the actual identity of the targets who received the warmer and colder treatment was counterbalanced; that is, each woman received positive and negative treatment an equal number of times over the course of the experiment.

After the video, the researchers gave the children four tasks designed to measure which target they preferred. The first was a simple preference question asking which woman they liked better. For the second, they were given an opportunity to behave prosocially. They were asked to which target the experimenter should give a toy. The two remaining tasks were opportunities to imitate one of the two targets. In the third task, they had to choose which of two labels to give to a toy which the two targets had called by different names. In the fourth, they had to choose one of two actions, ways to use a cone-shaped object, which the two targets had used differently.

The children showed a preference for the target who received the positive nonverbal treatment on three of the four tasks—all but the action imitation. A summary measure of the number of times out of four they showed favoritism toward the preferred target was statistically significant.

The researchers were less interested in demonstrating favoritism toward specific individuals than in the development of favoristism toward groups of people. In a second experiment, they measured whether the preferences demonstrated in Study 1 would generalize to other members of the target’s group. The two targets were introduced as members of the red group and the black group, matching the colors of their shirts. After the video, the children were given three tasks—preference, prosocial behavior and label imitation. The results replicated those of the first study.

Then the children were introduced to two new adult woman targets, said to be members of the red and black groups (wearing appropriate-colored shirts), who were best friends of the previous two women. They were asked which friend they liked better and were asked to imitate the actions of one of the two friends. The results showed greater liking for and more imitation of the friends of the preferred target on the video. In other words, the favoritism toward the preferred target (and against the non-preferred target) generalized to other members of their groups.

This study is a demonstration experiment. To prove that they understand how a widget works, researchers will show that they can create a widget in the laboratory. The widget in this case is group favoritism. We should not be put off by the fact that the groups are artificial, defined only by the colors of their shirts. Suppose the researchers had used members of real groups, such as White and African-American women, as their targets. In that case, the researchers would not have created group biases, since 4- and 5-year-olds already have racial attitudes. For evidence of how pre-existing attitudes can be strengthened or weakened by the way targets are treated, please read Part 2 of this post.

You may also be interested in reading:

What Does a Welfare Recipient Look Like?

Racial Profiling in Preschool

A Darker Side of Politics