Professor Steven Roberts on Children’s Beliefs About Race and Group Norms

By Mischa Rosenberg, Teacher
 
Steven Roberts’ first memory of how race might affect his life comes from when he was about 5 years old. Roberts recalls his parents debating in his childhood kitchen in Bamberg, Germany. His father, a black Guyanese man, believed that when Steven walked down the street, others would perceive him as black. His mother, a white German woman, countered that Steven would be perceived as “mixed,” or multiracial. It had never occurred to Steven that the outside world might see and judge him based on the color of his skin. Was he a black kid? Was he a “mixed” kid? And what did these concepts mean? Why did they matter?
 
During our fall staff development day, Roberts, now an assistant professor in Stanford’s psychology department, presented his research on how children conceptualize what constitutes a social group in two domains: concepts of racial stability and group norms. He is currently conducting research on group norms at Bing.
 
In the first domain, Roberts conducted a series of studies that asked: When do children begin to believe that race cannot change? He described a recent study that investigated whether 5- to 6-year-old children believe that language or race is more stable over time. For example, if they believed language to be more stable, a child might reason that a black child who speaks French would be more likely to grow up to be a white, French-speaking adult than to be a black, English-speaking adult. The researchers found that black 5- to 6-year-olds made the race match, indicating their belief that race is more stable than language. White 5- to 6-year-olds more frequently concluded that language is more stable than race.
 
Roberts was curious: If some children reason that race is less stable than language, perhaps they do not conceptualize race as stable at all. He posed a new question. Do children believe that race is more stable than emotion? Roberts undertook a series of studies, with 24 children in each experimental group, to explore this question.
 
Children understand that emotions are constantly in flux. For instance, a preschool-age child can reason that a person who feels sad after an unpleasant event can eventually feel happy again. Roberts’ research found that white 5- to 6-year-olds reported that race was similarly able to change over time. They surmised, based on photographs, that a happy white child could grow up to be a happy black adult or a sad white adult—they did not systematically prefer emotion or race matches. Emotions were seen to be as stable as race even though they were known to be temporary. Black children ages 5 to 6 and white children ages 9 to 10 selected race as more stable.
 
Roberts also performed two variations on this study. In one, the researcher presented the face photographs along with a cue as to the photo subject’s emotional state. The researcher would say something to the effect of “this child is feeling happy” as they showed a photo of a smiling child next to photos of an opposite-race smiling adult and same-race upset adult. In this version, white children ages 5 to 6 and 9 to 10 selected emotion as stable. Black children ages 5 to 6 and 9 to 10 selected race and emotion about equally. In a variation with a race cue emphasizing skin color, all groups chose race as more stable.
 
In short, Roberts found that beliefs about racial stability develop with age and are related to one’s own race, and that the language used when asking the question can shift children’s responses.
 
In the second domain, Roberts spoke about children’s concepts of group norms. Roberts discussed descriptive norms (how things are) and prescriptive norms (how things should be), and how these tie into interpretation of groups.
 
Previous research suggests that children tend to think about social groups as prescriptive because of moral reasoning, in-group biases and socialization. Roberts proposed that beyond these factors, children have an “intuitive tendency to take what is and infer what should be.” In other words, if children believe that a group is a certain way, it follows that individual members of that group should be that way as well.
 
Roberts designed a study based on two fictional social groups, “Hibbles” and “Glerks.” He presented descriptive information to 4- to 13-year-old participants, 327 in all. Hibbles, he explained, eat one kind of berries, and Glerks eat another kind of berries. He then presented a scenario that showed conforming behavior (such as a Hibble eating a Hibble berry) and another scenario showing non-conforming behavior (such Timesas a Hibble eating a Glerk berry). Half of the trials showed non-conforming behavior, and the other half conforming behavior. Roberts asked the participating child in each trial whether it was OK or not OK for a Hibble to eat that kind of berry. Most 4- to 6-year-olds (and older children to a lesser extent) responded that the non-conforming behavior was not OK. Older children were more accepting of non-conformity.
 
In a second study, Roberts removed all references to groups and focused instead on individuals. He presented an image of a single Hibble and said, “this one eats this kind of berry,” and a single Glerk, who ate the other kind of berry. Roberts predicted, and found, that children were less prescriptive in their judgments about conforming versus non-conforming behavior when presented with these examples. Children responded more often that it was OK to eat the other berry rather than that it was not OK. The conforming and non-conforming behaviors no longer reflected group regularities. Instead, they were individual choices.
 
The findings in these studies illustrate how, in the real world, merely seeing a group or receiving a label can be enough to elicit judgment and contribute to stereotyping and norm enforcement. Whether children are learning about Hibbles and Glerks or real-world categories such as race and gender, associating a group with a specific quality can propagate a descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency that enforces rigid and problematic beliefs. Roberts’ plans for future research on this tendency include looking at within-group variation and seeing how multiracial children—who embody multiple group memberships—think about group norms.