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Babies show racial bias when picking playmates, a study suggests.

Infants aged 15 months normally choose a playmate who is perceived as being fair, sharing toys equally for example, regardless of that person’s colour. ...

Babies are also more likely to help those of their ethnicity, an effect known as in-group bias, where people favour those with the same characteristics. ...

The researchers concluded that this implied babies could take into account both race and social history when deciding which person to play with.

“If all babies care about is fairness, then they would always pick the fair distributor, but we’re also seeing that they’re interested in consequences for their own group members,” said Prof Sommerville.

Two studies by researchers at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto and their collaborators from the US, UK, France and China, show that six- to nine-month-old infants demonstrate racial bias in favour of members of their own race and racial bias against those of other races.

In the first study, "Older but not younger infants associate own-race faces with happy music and other-race faces with sad music", published in Developmental Science, results showed that after six months of age, infants begin to associate own-race faces with happy music and other-race faces with sad music.

In the second study, "Infants rely more on gaze cues from own-race than other-race adults for learning under uncertainty", published in Child Development, researchers found that six- to eight-month-old infants were more inclined to learn information from an adult of his or her own race than from an adult of a different race.