Cross-Race Preferences for Same-Race Faces Extend Beyond the African Versus Caucasian Contrast in 3-Month-Old Infants

Abstract

A visual preference procedure was used to examine preferences among faces of different races and ethnicities (African, Asian, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern) in Chinese 3-month-old infants exposed only to Chinese faces. The infants demonstrated a preference for faces from their own ethnic group. Alongside previous results showing that Caucasian infants exposed only to Caucasian faces prefer same-race faces (Kelly et al., 2005) and that Caucasian and African infants exposed only to native faces prefer the same over the other-race faces (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006), the findings reported here (a) extend the same-race preference observed in young infants to a new race of infants (Chinese), and (b) show that cross-race preferences for same-race faces extend beyond the perceptually robust contrast between African and Caucasian faces