Ethnic discrimination among young children

In yesterday's post, I discussed the idea of taste-based discrimination. Such discrimination is effectively a prejudice against members of particular population groups (such as a particular ethnic group or gender). On that theme, I recently read two research articles that looked at ethnic discrimination among children.

The first article was this one by Jane Friesen (Simon Fraser University) and co-authors, published in the Journal of Economic Psychology in 2012 (ungated earlier version here). Their sample was 430 Grade 1 and 2 children (aged 5-8 years) from Vancouver. Friesen et al. ran an experiment that involved two tasks. The second task (a 'sharing task') was the most relevant to this post. The sharing task was a variant of the dictator game, which is a common experimental game used to examine norms of fairness within a population. In this case, each child got to share 12 stickers among four people (themselves, a White child from their class, an East Asian child from their class, and a South Asian child from their class). The task was repeated three times for each child. 

Looking at the results of the sharing task, Friesen et al. find that:

Overall, participants share on average 13.6/36 stickers or 38% of their endowment. South Asian children share fewer stickers overall (11.7) compared to Whites (13.8) and East Asians (13.7)...

...50% of participants chose a non-discriminatory allocation (including 5.2% of participants who shared zero stickers)... White participants were substantially more likely (55%) than East Asian (45%) and South Asian (40%) participants to choose a non-discriminatory allocation, and girls were more likely (54%) than boys (42%) to do so...

...on average, White participants shared slightly more stickers with the recipient from their own ethnic category than with the other two; East Asians participants shared slightly fewer with their own category than with the other two; and South Asian participant shared slightly fewer with the East Asian recipient than with the other two.

That provides some evidence in favour of discrimination. Going a bit further, Friesen et al. then run a regression model on their data, and find that:

...White subjects share slightly less than one-third of a sticker more on average with the White target than with either of the other two recipients... However, East Asian participants show no in-group bias; if anything, they share fewer stickers with their own group with other groups... This difference in patterns of in-group bias between Whites and East Asians is statistically significant... the relevant point estimates indicate that South Asians may show somewhat less in-group bias than Whites in terms of the number of stickers shared... but this difference is not statistically significant.

In other words, there is evidence for ethnic discrimination among White and South Asian children, but not among East Asian children. There were no differences in the degree of discrimination between girls and boys.

The second article was this one by Annika List, John List (both University of Chicago), and Anya Samek (University of Southern California), published in 2017 in the journal Economics Letters (ungated earlier version here). List et al. report on a field experiment among children aged three to five years, which also involved an application of the dictator game. In this case:

...children were matched to teddy bears or other students and decided how many of their marshmallows to send them. We unobtrusively indicated the race of the match by showing pictures of hands (lighter or darker skin color) or pictures of teddy bear paws (light or dark brown).

The choice to use teddy bears as well as human hands is novel, and explained as:

...we use the teddy bears as a control in order to rule out that preferences are driven solely by dislike for darker or lighter colors. By comparing the aversion to giving to a darker color hand person relative to darker paw teddy bear, we disentangle the role of racial discrimination from preferences for colors in children’s choices.

Based on their sample of 117 children, each completing four rounds of the dictator game, List et al. find that:

On average, white children send 0.97 marshmallows to white recipients and 1.47 marshmallows to black recipients. Similarly, Hispanic children send 1.18 marshmallows to white recipients and 1.55 marshmallows to black recipients. Alternatively, black children send more marshmallows to white recipients (1.33) relative to other blacks (0.99)...

Contrary to our expectation, we do not see a difference when comparing giving to teddy bears versus to human children. 

In other words, this study provides little evidence of ethnic discrimination among the youngest children. 

These two studies piqued my curiosity because it seems somewhat obvious that ethnic discrimination develops over the course of a person's childhood. Taken together, these two studies provide some support for that view. I was a little surprised that there wasn't already a well-established literature in this space (see this 2008 article in the journal Nature for more). However, these two studies tell us little about what contributes to discrimination among children, or how it can be prevented. That gives a lot of scope for future research in this space.