Incorporating insights from category learning and from real-world structure into racial/ethnic bias reduction approaches in early childhood

We expand on the broadly accepted view that children learn about racial categories from exposure to regularities in their environment by documenting two kinds of real-word structure that are likely to contribute to this learning. Across two studies, we document the frequency with which different racial groups are depicted in children’s books and the contexts surrounding the depiction of racial groups in children’s books. Characters from minoritized racial groups are not only numerically underrepresented in U.S. children’s books (Study 1), but there are also differences in the contextual themes associated with different racial groups (Study 2). Contemporary category learning accounts predict that such input would result in decreases in representational similarity across racial groups and it is thus likely to contribute to the emergence of racial categories – and potentially biases – in childhood. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of social learning and propose a mechanistic framework for increasing intergroup similarity in young children.