Children with a rare genetic condition seem to lack any kind of racial bias, unlike any other children previously tested.
These children are also unusually gregarious and unafraid of strangers, leading to the suggestion that fear of people who are different from ourselves underlies low-level racial prejudice.
Children with Williams syndrome, as this condition is called, have mild to moderate learning difficulties and a distinctive facial appearance. Their most striking characteristic, though, is extreme sociability.
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鈥淭hey don鈥檛 recognise danger in faces and [they] approach anyone,鈥� says of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, whose team led the new study.
In an earlier study on children鈥檚 reactions to angry faces, his group attributed lack of fear to reduced neural activity in the amygdala, a brain region that processes social threats. Since racial bias in adults has been also linked to over-activity in this area, his team speculated that people with Williams syndrome wouldn鈥檛 favour their own race because of their presumed deficits in processing social fear.
Cartoon characters
To find out, they presented 40 white children, aged 5 to 17, with one white and one dark-skinned cartoon character and asked them to match up the characters with a positive or negative description.
The 20 children who were developmentally normal had the usual biases towards their own racial group, which appear in infants as young as 3 years old. They almost always paired descriptions such as 鈥渒ind鈥� and 鈥渟mart鈥� to the white character and negative descriptions, such as 鈥渦gly鈥� and 鈥渟tupid,鈥� to the dark-skinned protagonist. Not so for 20 children with Williams, who were just as likely to praise a dark-skinned character as they were to admonish a white one.
鈥淭his is the best evidence yet that racial stereotyping is dictated by social fear,鈥� says Meyer-Lindenberg.
Surprisingly, the Williams children displayed the same gender biases as other children, with boys loading praise onto male characters and girls favouring the females depicted in the cartoons.
鈥淭hese findings are useful because they show that each kind of prejudice is distinctive,鈥� says of Princeton University.
Racial bias
To further explore the link between fear of strangers and racial bias, Meyer-Lindenberg鈥檚 team plan to scan the brains of children with Williams to see how their amygdalae respond during similar tests of racial and gender bias.
of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, also thinks that a lack of fear could explain why children with Williams syndrome are unbiased toward other races and so extrovert.
The new paper backs up work in 2005 by Olsson鈥檚 team, which also found a link between fear and racial bias. Black and white university students were conditioned to associate photographs of black and white individuals with a slight shock. They retained the association longer, even without the shock, if the photograph depicted someone of a different race. This suggests that the students were already fearful of other races on some level.
Yet Meyer-Lindenberg鈥檚 colleague Andreia Santos stresses that their team鈥檚 findings 鈥渄o not permit firm conclusions about whether racial stereotyping is innate or learned鈥�.
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