natural assumptions: race, essence, and taxonomies of human kinds

Social Research, Summer, 1998 by Lawrence A. Hirschfeld

Indeed, the second prediction was supported by the children's responses. Even three-year-olds expected that a child is more likely racially to match his or her parents than to resemble them in physique, and four-year-olds expected that a child is more likely to resemble his or her parents racially than to resemble them in either physique or occupation. These findings are inconsistent with the standard claim that preschool children's social reasoning is tethered to superficial aspects of appearance, but are consistent with the claim that they naturalize race.

A second study revisited the claim that young children do not grasp that race is immutable. If children were as environmentalist as the standard view claims, then they should expect that changes in the racial environment will lead to changes in race, just as they should expect changes in the sartorial environment will lead to changes in clothing. To test this, I told preschool children a story about two families, one black and the other white, whose babies were born in the same hospital on the same day. Inadvertently, each couple took the other couple's baby home. The story stressed the link between pregnancy and birth and highlighted the social correlates of parenting. We then showed the children pictures of two school-aged children, one who racially resembled the birth parents, the other who racially resembled the adoptive parents. We asked the children to identify which child went with which couple. Again, the logic of the task is simple: if children believe that race is socially determined, they should choose the baby that matches the race of the adoptive parents. If they believe that race is an immutable biological property, they should choose the baby that matches the race of the birth parents.

The results were clear. Even three-year-olds reliably chose the child that matched the birth parents' race (that is, they understood that the child's race would not change as a result of living with the adoptive parents), consistent with the claim that preschoolers understand that an individual's race is set at birth and alterable by conditions of their nurture. The surprising thing about these findings--apart from the contribution they make to the parochial debate about when a coherent account of race emerges--is that taken together they suggest, indeed support quite strongly, that children develop much of their beliefs about race on their own. How else would children acquire this knowledge? It is unlikely that they are taught it. Adults, at least in contemporary North America, generally believe that their young children are color-blind. Indeed, several studies confirm that race plays almost no role in young children's behavior and speech (Aboud, 1988; Holmes, 1995). Perhaps because of this adults quite strikingly avoid talking about race to children (Kokfin et al., 1995). Since their peers and their parents pretty much ignore race, it is not obvious what learning conditions would lead young children to develop the extraordinarily sophisticated knowledge of race that they do.