Abstract
Forms of racial cognition begin early: from about 3 months onwards, many human infants prefer to look at own-race faces over other-race faces. What is not yet fully clear is what the psychological mechanisms are that underlie racial thoughts at this early age, and why these mechanisms evolved. In this paper, we propose answers to these questions. Specifically, we use recent experimental data and evolutionary biological insights to argue that early racial cognition is simply the result of a “facial familiarity mechanism”: a mental structure that leads infants to attend to faces that look similar to familiar faces, and which probably has evolved to track potential caregivers. We further argue that this account can be combined with the major existing treatments of the evolution of racial cognition, which apply to (near-) adult humans. The result is a heterogeneous picture of racial thought, according to which early and later racial cognition result from very different psychological mechanisms.
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Notes
A word about the term “race”: we do not think that this term picks out a meaningful natural—as opposed to socially constructed—kind (for some supporting arguments, see, e.g., Appiah 1992, 1996; Haslanger 2012). What the research surveyed in this section shows, therefore, is that infants show preferences that range over a purely socially constructed kind. See also note 13.
While this lability thus decreases with age, there is evidence that it remains relatively strong even into adulthood: for instance, Kurzban et al. (2001) were able to deflate the tendency to categorize by race in adults simply by exposing them to an alternate social world for about 4 min.
Similarly, Kelly et al. (2007b) found that while 3-month-old Caucasian infants could discriminate other-race faces (i.e. African, Middle Eastern, and Chinese), 6-month-old infants could only discriminate Caucasian and Chinese faces, and 9-month-old infants only discriminated among own-race faces. Note that infants also need time to acquire the ability to distinguish the identity of faces (e.g. Chien et al. (2016)). Still, what matters here is just that, with more exposure to own-race faces and little exposure to other-race faces, infants cease to have the ability to recognize other-race faces while they retain their ability to recognize own-race faces.
We use the term “byproduct” in the sense standard in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology: as traits that have evolved not because they have been specifically selected for, but because they are connected to other traits that have been selected for. Relatedly, it is useful to note that Hirschfeld (1996) and Kurzban et al. (2001) refer to modules as characterized by the massive modularity hypothesis (Carruthers 2006), rather than Fodor’s (1983) notion of a module. For more on both of these points, see e.g. Tooby and Cosmides (1992) and Buss et al. (1998).
A quick remark about nativism and learning is useful here. These accounts combine nativist and empiricist elements: they posit the existence of innate structures that facilitate the learning of certain facts—namely, facts about the prevailing coalitions, social groups, or ethnies.
A version of this idea is also being hinted at in Pascalis and Kelly (2009), D. J. Kelly et al. (2005), Bar-Haim et al. (2006), and Sangrigoli and De Schonen (2004) (among others). However, these other publications are first and foremost experimental papers, and they do not spell out in any detail an account of the evolution of infant racial cognition.
Further relevant here are the findings concerning “face blindness” (see, e.g., Damasio et al. 1982; Farah et al. 1995), which also suggest that humans track faces in a way that is quite different from how they track other shapes and objects. Moreover, a face selective electrophysiological activity has been observed in event-related potential (ERP) studies, which is particular to human face stimuli and has been observed neither for animal faces (de Haan et al. 2002) nor for objects (Rossion et al. 2000).
Interestingly, Quinn et al. (2008) further found that racial facial preferences trump gender-based facial preferences: 3-month-old Caucasian infants who were reared by Caucasian caregivers were shown to prefer female over male Caucasian faces, but did not show any preference of female over male Asian faces. See below for more on this.
This is also supported by the Liu et al. (2015) studies: although 3-month-old infants look longer at own-race faces, 9-month-olds look longer at other-race faces. This suggests that infants’ visual preferences shift from familiarity preferences (for own-race faces) to novelty preferences (for other-races) as they grow up. This is in line with previous work with nonface objects, which demonstrated that infants have a tendency to shift their preferences from a familiar to a novel stimulus with increasing exposure to the familiar stimulus (Houston-Price and Nakai 2004). Underlying these findings is thus the fact that infants group faces into “familiar” and “unfamiliar” classes.
There is some comparative psychological evidence that is worth mentioning here, though. Sugita (2008) conducted a deprivation study with Japanese macaques who were separated from their parents and reared by human caregivers who wore masks—i.e. they had no exposure to any faces for 6–24 months. The monkeys, before they were being allowed to see a face, showed a preference for human and monkey faces in photographs, and they were able to individuate human faces as well as monkey faces. After the deprivation period, they were exposed to either human or monkey faces for a month. After this exposition, the monkeys demonstrated preference for the category of faces to which they were exposed over the other category (and they were able to discriminate individual faces only within their familiar category of faces). Therefore, this study indicates that these monkeys have a predisposition to group faces into similarity classes of “familiar” and “unfamiliar” (Kelly et al. 2009; Sugita 2008). This thus speaks at least for the fact that generating similarity measures among faces has evolved a relatively long time ago.
Note that this differs from the suggestion of, e.g., Pascalis and Kelly (2009) that the FFT evolved to track potentially dangerous others. Given the findings of, e.g., Quinn et al. (2002), Rosa Salva et al. (2011), and Kaminski et al. (2009), we think that it is more plausible to see the evolutionary function of the FFT as the tracking of potential caregivers, though this may be more of a difference in emphasis.
There are various ways to measure similarity in faces: for example, using morphometrics, quantitative genetic studies, or faciometrics (see, e.g., Cox and Cox 2000, for an overview). For present purposes, though, these details do not matter.
Here, it is important to recall that (a) racial classifications differ across time and space (e.g. “Irish” was a racial classification in the nineteenth Century in the US, and “Han Chinese” is a racial classification in contemporary China; see e.g. Roediger (1999, 2002) and Dikötter (1997, 2015), and (b) biologically, there is little to underwrite any of these racial classifications (Appiah 1996; Haslanger 2012; though see also Spencer 2014).
This is further made implausible by the fact (noted earlier) that infants also consider the gendered features of faces to group them into similarity classes of familiar faces (Quinn et al. 2002).
This account is also supported by the work of Quinn et al. (2016), who have found that while 6-month-old White infants categorically represent the distinction between Black and Asian faces, 9-month-old White infants form a broader other-race category which includes both Black and Asian faces. This suggests that as infants get older, the race of their primary caregiver gets elevated as a marker of which sorts of faces should be included in the “familiar” group, while other “racial” differences get downgraded as bases for similarity groupings of familiar faces.
Here, it is also interesting to note that Heron-Delaney et al. (2017) found that Caucasian 3.5- and 6-month-old infants have a preference for upright Caucasian adult over Caucasian infant faces, but no preferences among upright Asian adult and infant faces. This preference is also well accounted for by the fact that these Caucasian infants were mostly familiar with adult Caucasian caregivers.
Similarly, Pauker et al. (2016a) found that contextual factors—both of the infants’ cultural background and the experimental setting—influence their propensity towards racial categorization. Again, this is very much in line with our account here.
Relatedly, it is also worthwhile noting that our account makes some as yet untested predictions that can be used to further distinguish it from rivals. For example, our account predicts that infants growing up in a racially heterogeneous environment will still categorize humans into different groups—corresponding to the familiar and the unfamiliar—but that this categorization will be highly specific to the facial features of the caregivers these infants have been in contact with. For example, some infants growing up in racially heterogeneous environments might categorize heavily by gender, whereas others might categorize heavily by the presence or absence of facial ornaments (earrings etc.). While this prediction of relatively great diversity in facial preferences among infants growing up in racially heterogeneous environments has not yet been tested, we think it is noteworthy here, as it shows that our account is empirically fruitful.
For example, they observed that 10-month-old infants accepted toys equally from own and other-race individuals. In fact, Kinzler and Spelke (2011) did not detect race-based social preferences until 5 years of age: even 2.5-year-old children gave toys equally to White and Black individuals. They did find that 5-to-6-year-old children expressed race-based social preferences in the same events. See below in section 5 for more on this.
Scherf and Scott (2012) also hint at a pluralist picture of racial cognition, but for very different reasons.
See e.g. Lam et al. (2011) on some of the changes in racial cognition around age 4.
So, for example, Pauker et al. (2016b) have shown that the propensity for out-group racial stereotyping and for the essentializing of social groups in 4-year olds was culturally variable (greater in Massachusetts and lower in Hawaii). Thus, more research is needed to understand how, when, and in what contexts the switch from the FFT-based to a more complex form of racial cognition occurs.
We also think this conclusion has some major policy implications (see, for example, Lee et al. 2017a, b, for how perceptual training—i.e. exposure to other race-faces in infancy—would reduce implicit racial bias against other races). However, bringing these out in detail calls for a paper of its own.
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We would like to thank the anonymous referees for very helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.
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Osmanoglu, K., W. Schulz, A. It Just Looks the Same: An Evolutionary Psychological Account of Differences in Racial Cognition Among Infants and Older Humans. Rev.Phil.Psych. 10, 631–647 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0417-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0417-0