Racial Preferences in Young Children

Past studies (Landreth & Johnson 1953; Stevenson & Stewart 1958) have shown that young children between the ages of 3 and 5 are already beginning to form preferences (and possibly prejudices) for racial features, particularly concerning skin color. The purpose of this experiment was to investigate whether children at ages 3, 4, and 5 also show any preference for other features, such as eye color, hair color, and hair type. The subjects were 30 children attending a racially mixed preschool. There were 10 5-year-olds, 10 4-year-olds, and 10 3-year-olds. At each age level, half of the subjects were Negro and half were white. The test materials consisted of 64 drawings of children's faces. Four facial features were systematically varied: eye color (blue and brown), hair color (brown and black), hair type (straight and curly), and skin color (white and dark brown). The 64 faces were shown in pairs to the children. Within each pair, the characteristics of only one feature differed (e.g., one picture had blue eyes and the other had brown eyes). Thus, for each feature, eight different pairs were possible. All 30 children were tested individually. The child was instructed to point to the picture of the child that he would rather play with. Scores were obtained representing the percentage of the typically Negro characteristic (eye color = brown; hair color = black; hair type = curly; skin color = dark brown) that the subject chose out of eight test pairs for a given feature (see table 1).