SBP: The Emergence of Social Biases in Infancy

This project investigates the developmental origins of social bias. Before their first birthdays, infants prefer people from familiar racial groups and people who speak their native language. These biases are related to social experience: Infants who have more contact with social diversity are less biased against people from unfamiliar groups.

The proposed studies will shed new light on the mechanisms that give rise to infants’ social biases by innovating methods to: (1) assess the emotional and cognitive aspects of infants’ biases, (2) investigate the neural systems involved, and (3) identify the aspects of social experience that may be important for establishing social bias. The findings will provide insights into how to mitigate the negative consequences of social biases, as well as developing new research tools for studying relations between behavior, brain and social experience during early development.

A major goal of this project is to address the dearth of research with minority populations in cognitive development research. Studies will involve equal numbers of infants from minority and majority backgrounds in order to better understand how social biases emerge across the diversity of human experience.

Prior research indicates that infants’ visual preferences express social bias, but the cognitive and affective processes involved, and the associated social and neural mechanisms are poorly understood. This project addresses these open issues by bringing together an innovative set of behavioral, neural and social measures in research with 9-month-old infants.

Across six studies, infants will be presented with people from different linguistic and racial groups and infants’ brain activity (EEG: frontal-temporal theta; mu rhythm; frontal alpha asymmetry) and behavioral responses (attention, learning, imitation, and approach-withdrawal tendencies) to members of familiar vs. unfamiliar social groups will be compared. The diversity in infants’ social environments will be assessed via neighborhood census data and a parent survey to assess infants’ close social networks.

This research will provide fundamental new insights into the nature of infants’ social biases and the conditions that contribute to them. The multidisciplinary approach will inform scientific understanding of brain-behavior-environment relations during early development.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.