Abstract
As social beings, humans attend to cues signaling the groups (e.g., ethnicity, gender, and age) to which they belong, using those cues to make further decisions in their lives. Here, we examine whether young children growing up in an ethnically diverse community can distinguish between different ethnic groups and show a preference for their own group. We also investigate the role of key family and school background factors. One hundred and ninety-one Hong Kong Chinese children (93 female; age range: 39 to 78 months; mean age: 61.14 months) were asked to complete two versions of a computer task, where they had to sort ethnically ambiguous faces that were either happy or angry as belonging to the ingroup (Chinese) or to the outgroup (White or Southeast Asian). Overall, children were able to distinguish between ingroup and outgroup faces. Logistic regression analyses revealed that children were more likely to categorize the angry faces as either of the two outgroups than as Chinese. On the White-Chinese task, participant age, participant gender, and ethnic group recognition impacted the degree to which children considered the angry faces as belonging to the outgroup. The type of school the children attended and the presence of a domestic helper at home influenced children's decisions as well. For the Southeast Asian-Chinese task, participant age, ethnic group recognition, and domestic helper presence impacted children's categorization of the ethnically ambiguous faces. Our findings suggest that by preschool age, Hong Kong Chinese children exhibit an implicit preference for their ethnicity, though this preference is strongly affected by group membership in other social domains and by specific home and school experiences.