Young children perceive less humanness in outgroup faces

We investigated when young children first dehumanise outgroups. Across two studies, 5- and6-year-olds were asked to rate how human they thought a set of ambiguous doll-human facemorphs were. We manipulated whether these faces belonged to their gender in- or genderoutgroup (Study 1) and to a geographically based in- or outgroup (Study 2). In both studies,the tendency to perceive outgroup faces as less human relative to ingroup faces increasedwith age. Explicit ingroup preference, in contrast, was present even in the youngest childrenand remained stable across age. These results demonstrate that children dehumaniseoutgroup members from relatively early in development and suggest that the tendency to doso may be partially distinguishable from intergroup preference. This research has importantimplications for our understanding of children’s perception of humanness and the origins ofintergroup bias.