A major component in childhood development is absorbing information from the world around us and a recent study in Developmental Science finds that 6 years old may be the age when children start to develop first impressions from cultural stereotypes.
“Overall, findings that may initially appear to favour a nativist account of first impressions are, in reality, equally compatible with a learning account. On balance, we argue that the available evidence favours the view that first impressions from faces are acquired through experience.”
The study sought to find whether cultural first impressions could be acquired through experience. The researchers had adults look at a series of Caucasian faces with or without glasses and then rate the stranger’s intelligence level. Results found adults inferring strangers wearing glasses as more intelligent than those without glasses. This persisted even when researchers instructed the adults to ignore the glasses when rating intelligence.
When the researchers tested the same experiment on children, 6-year old but not 4-year old children thought strangers with glasses looked smarter. However, the researchers did note that the age difference may be attributed to the difficulty of the study task. “The finding that 4-year-olds do not show significant sensitivity to either cultural or physical cues to intelligence seems inconsistent with previous findings which report adult-like consistency in trait judgments of competence by this age. This may be because previous developmental work has used computer-generated stimuli whereas we used photographs of real people perhaps making the task more challenging.”
They also found 6-year old children associated glasses and physical cues to infer a stranger’s intellect. The author suggests these results may help to modify children’s learning of biased cultural assumptions.
“If first impressions are shaped by cultural learning, then changes to cultural products can alter the types of first impressions individuals form. In other words, it may be possible to mitigate widely held but deleterious societal beliefs through modifying the available cultural input,” concluded the study authors.
The study, “Culturally learned first impressions occur rapidly and automatically and emerge early in development”, was authored by Adam Eggleston, Jonathan C. Flavell, Steven P. Tipper, Richard Cook, and Harriet Over.
(Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay)
