Discovering Social Difference - the Role of Appearance in the Development of Racial Awareness

Abstract

Two experiments examined French preschoolers′ memory for racial and other social information to test the claim, assumed in most previous research, that perceptual factors are integral to the derivation and representation of racial categories. Experiment 1 tested children′s recall of social descriptions embedded in a verbal text. Experiment 2 examined children′s social memory in a parallel visual narrative. Children recalled considerably more racial information after listening to the complex verbal narrative than after viewing the similarly complex visual one. Even when the link between the racial label and its referent were pointed out immediately before viewing the visual text, children rarely recalled racial labels. In contrast, memory for other kinds of social information was greater on the task using a visual narrative. Results cast doubt on the claim that perceptual information is a crucial component of racial categories. Instead, these data are more consistent with an alternative view that racial information is represented in two overlapping but separate categories, one perceptual and the other verbal.