Does the Race of the Stranger Matter? Investigating Toddlers’ Wariness Towards Familiar and Unfamiliar Racial Group Strangers

Within the first year of life, infants can perceptually discriminate people by their racial group. However, beyond perceptual discrimination, it remains unclear whether infants use racial groups to guide their social behaviors, such as whether they approach or withdraw from people of different racial backgrounds. This question is particularly understudied during toddlerhood (between 1 and 2 years of age), before children can reliably report racial attitudes from around 3 to 4 years of age. The present study examined whether 12- to 25-month-old U.S. toddlers (N = 118) show greater wariness toward strangers from unfamiliar than familiar racial groups in a within-subject design to determine whether toddlers use a person’s racial group to guide their social behaviors. Toddlers did not exhibit significantly greater wariness toward strangers from unfamiliar than familiar racial groups, and this pattern was not statistically significantly moderated by their racial backgrounds, temperament, or the racial diversity of their social networks or neighborhoods. These findings suggest that racial groups may not function as a salient cue for guiding toddlers’ social responses during the second year of life. More broadly, these findings contribute to growing evidence that early perceptual sensitivity to race does not necessarily entail race-based biases in evaluations or behaviors in early childhood.