Cognitive Daily covers a new article on implicit attitudes research on color bias (black people’s faces vs. white people’s faces). Nothing earth-shattering here, but it was done with children as well as adults, which expands the evidence that these biases are implicit and emerge at a relatively young age. How young is the question – and are we born with such implicit attitudes? That leads down the evolutionary psychology path…
For every age group, the association of white faces with good words was stronger than the association of black faces with good words: an implicit bias for white faces over black faces. The bias must have formed before the age of six, and is undiminished in adulthood. To make sure everyone understood the task, a similar test was given to measure preference for insects versus flowers. Everyone except six-year-old boys said they preferred the flowers, but when the preference was measured with the implicit task, even the boys showed an implicit bias for flowers.
Technorati Tags: evolutionary psychology, psychology, attitudes