Astronauts Need A Decent Night’s Sleep Too

By Matthew Warren

As I write this post, I’m struggling a little to put words onto the page. I didn’t sleep well last night, and my tiredness has taken its toll on my ability to concentrate. But at least I’m sat at my desk at home and not, say, in control of a massive hunk of metal filled with fuel and electronics, hurtling through space at thousands of kilometres an hour. Because a new study in Scientific Reports has found that astronauts need to get enough sleep too — and when they don’t, their performance suffers.

Erin Flynn-Evans from NASA Ames Research Center and colleagues studied people taking part in a spaceflight simulation on Earth. They weren’t actually astronauts, but “astronaut-like” participants, who all met NASA’s physical standards for space flight, as well as other criteria (such as having Master’s degree in a STEM subject). The participants lived in the Human Analog Research Exploration (HERA) habitat, a self-contained unit designed to mimic living and working conditions during space exploration. This paper included data from five separate “missions”, each of which involved four participants living together in the HERA habitat for 45 days (though one of the missions had to be cut short due to a hurricane).

Throughout each mission, the participants had a variety of tasks to complete, such as “extravehicular activities” and scientific work. Once every three days, at five points throughout the day, they also completed the psychomotor vigilance task, which simply involves watching a screen and pressing a button whenever a light randomly appears.

Importantly, each weekday participants were only allowed five hours of sleep; at the weekend they were allowed eight hours. They weren’t permitted to nap, and could only drink caffeine before 2pm. The researchers could therefore look at how performance on the psychomotor vigilance task changed across the course of the mission, as well as specifically on days when the “astronauts” got more or less sleep.

The team found that participants’ performance worsened as the mission went on, with reaction times on the task becoming slower. Interestingly, participants’ self-reported fatigue didn’t decline across the course of the mission, suggesting that tests like this may provide a better measure of performance than simply asking astronauts how they’re feeling. Participants were also slower and missed more of the lights in the task on days when they got only five hours of sleep, compared to days when they got eight hours.

Overall, the authors conclude, the findings “suggest that simply meeting the criteria required to be an astronaut is not in itself a determinant of resilience to chronic sleep restriction”. This isn’t entirely surprising — after all, astronauts are only human, and people in other professions with rigorous training requirements, such as pilots, are also adversely affected by lack of sleep.

Of course, there are some obvious limitations to the study: although it simulated a space mission, it was still conducted on Earth; similarly, the psychomotor vigilance task isn’t necessarily a good representation of the complex jobs astronauts need to perform. It’s also worth noting that the changes in reaction times on the task were pretty small, in the region of tens of milliseconds difference between the beginning and end of the missions, and there was lots of variation between participants. It would be interesting to explore these in more detail: are there particular characteristics that make astronauts’ performance more or less likely to suffer after a lack of sleep?

Still, the research does suggest that many days or weeks of poor sleep may build up to impair astronauts’ day-to-day functioning: an important insight given that this is the sort of time frame for future missions to the moon or beyond. And while NASA does allow crewmembers to sleep for eight hours per night on missions, astronauts themselves report actually sleeping for just six hours. So, the researchers say, it will be important to consider ways to promote better sleep while in space.

– Changes in performance and bio‑mathematical model performance predictions during 45 days of sleep restriction in a simulated space mission

Matthew Warren (@MattBWarren) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

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Even Imaginary Barriers Can Prevent Kids From Cheating On Tests

By Emma Young

How can you discourage kids from copying each other on tests? You could always use a simple frame to separate them, or even a ruler to draw an imaginary line between their desks. When these behavioural “nudge” techniques were used in new research published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, they significantly reduced cheating among 5 to 6-year-olds. This shows “that even seemingly unremarkable features of children’s environments can nudge them to act honestly,” write the researchers, led by Li Zhao at Hangzhou Normal University in China.

The team set out to explore the extent to which a physical, spatial barrier might also act as a barrier against moral transgressions. In each of a series of four studies, a child was seated a small table and given a set of counting problems, which were impossible to complete in the allotted time. A short distance away was another identical table, on which the experimenter put the answer sheet before leaving the room. Though all the children were instructed not to cheat, from a purely practical perspective, it was easy to do so. In fact, in the control conditions, when there was no barrier (real or imaginary) between the child’s table and the answers, hidden cameras showed that about half did indeed look at the answers.

However, the team found that a barrier of some sort did make a difference. In the first study, a metal frame either fitted with transparent plastic cheating or simply left empty was placed between the tables. In both scenarios, the child could easily see the answers if they wanted to — but the frame with the sheeting cut the cheating rate to about 15%, while the empty frame reduced cheating to just under 30%.

In the second and third studies, the team moved the barrier into a variety of positions around the tables. They found that to reduce cheating, the barrier had to be in the child’s eye line when they looked towards the other table.

In the fourth study, there was no physical barrier at all. Instead, before leaving the room, the experimenter used a toy magic wand to outline what she said was an “invisible frame” between the tables. This imaginary barrier was about as effective as the empty frame was in the first study at reducing cheating.

Why did a simple frame, and even an imaginary frame, reduce cheating? One possibility, the researchers say, is that from a very young age, children learn to use environmental cues to guide their movements. So, for example, they might learn that while it’s okay to play football in an open park, it’s not okay to pass through a gate in a neighbour’s fence, to play football in their garden. It’s possible that children generalised this type of learning, viewing the barriers as dividers between a permissible space and a prohibited space.

In English, of course, we even talk about “crossing the line” between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. (I seem to tell my children that they’ve crossed the line on an almost daily basis.) These were Chinese children. I don’t know if Mandarin has the equivalent metaphor, but if it does, this might have influenced their children’s behaviour — or, if the study were to be replicated in an English-speaking country, perhaps cheating might be reduced still further.

As the team notes, though the frame was always in place when the child sat down, and the experimenter didn’t even refer to it (except for when it was imaginary), the children may well have made the implicit assumption that someone had put it there for a reason — presumably to stop them from cheating. So kids’ ability to tap into this sort of social cue could be part of the reason why they were less inclined to cheat.

This study was on young children. Would a physical barrier have the same impact on cheating in older kids? In this study, older children had a higher rate of cheating than younger children (no matter what the experimental condition) — but the frames were just as effective at reducing cheating, no matter what the child’s age. So it’s possible that older children would be susceptible to the frame effect, too.  

More work is clearly needed to examine the specific mechanisms that underlie the new findings, and to explore just how barriers might be used in real classrooms and exam halls.

– The moral barrier effect: Real and imagined barriers can reduce cheating

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Temper Tantrums and How to Deal with them

All kids have tantrums and no parent looks forward to them. How to deal with them varies from child to child. So much so that a tantrum strategy that works on one child may not help when dealing with a sibling’s tantrum. This article looks at what tantrums are, some of their root causes and outlines 5 things that can help curb tantrums and 5 things that you want to avoid. Finally, it outlines when it is a good idea to seek assistance with a tantrum pattern.

Are Tantrums Normal?

A temper tantrum is a sudden outburst of frustration and anger. It can be verbal or physical or both. They are a completely normal part of childhood development and usually last between 2 and 15 minutes. Tantrums are most common in children aged one to four years.

What Causes Tantrums?

Children experience strong emotions ahead of being able to express how they feel in a socially acceptable manner. So, while they learning to control and express their emotions it is not uncommon for children to have outbursts of unplanned frustration and anger.

10 Possible Reasons Why Tantrums Occur:

1. Frustration at not being able to communicate what they want or feel
2. Over-tired
3. Hungry
4. Over-stimulation or needing to have some down or alone time
5. Testing boundaries and discovering they can’t have their own way
6. Having something taken away from them
7. Transitioning between two places such as home and day care
8. Confusion – when a child isn’t sure what is being expected of them
9. Feeling worried, insecure or upset and not knowing how to perceive something
10. Tension within their home or day care

Often removing a child, who isn’t calming down, from their immediate surroundings will assist in halting the tantrum.

How to Deal with Tantrums

There are ways to deal with tantrums that can deescalate them before they happen or while one is happening. And there are ways to escalate them quickly or spark a tantrum.

5 Things that Help

1. Identify the Feeling: Help them by identify and label feelings by describing what you seeing when you see they gearing up for a tantrum or leading them through “unpacking” how they feel. An emotion chart can help a child express themselves and identify their own feelings.
2. Acknowledge the feelings but not the behaviour: One way of doing this is to say to your child that they are allowed to feel frustrated or angry but if they want to have a tantrum, they need to go to their bedroom to have it. You’ll be surprised at how many children will actually do this!
3. Reward Good Behaviour: Reinforce good behaviour through specific praise. For example: Thank you for using your indoor voice and not shouting when you got frustrated in the shop. This reenforces a child’s respectable behaviour and acknowledges their good choices.
4. Routine: Establish a consistent daily routine that a child is aware of and that can assist with preventing your child from being over-tired or hungry. While routines need to allow some flexibility to be maintained, their magic lies in the way that structure augments feelings of security.
5. Set a Good Example: Remember how you behave when you frustrated or angry is going to be copied by your child. Consistently make sure that you behave in the way you expect your child to.

5 Things that make Tantrums Worse

1. Don’t lose Your Temper, Lecture or Threaten: This will escalate the situation, resulting in embarrassment for both you and your child. Rather discuss it with them, away from everyone else, once they have calmed down.
2. Do not Give in: Giving into a tantrum’s demands will teach a child how to manipulate you through bad behaviour.
3. Do not Bribe: Giving a treat to stop bad behaviour is teaching a child that if they act in-appropriately they will be rewarded.
4. Inconsistency: If you aren’t consistent in your reaction or following through on what you say (eg: punishments, consequences, rewards or reinforcing expectations) a child is likely to be confused and feel insecure.
5. Leave them Alone: While it can be helpful to remove yourself from their line of sight during a tantrum, you or someone you trust must always be able to see them.

Reasons to seek Assistance

Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine divided tantrums into four categories: Non-destructive aggression (stamping, non-directed kicking, hitting eg: wall), aggressive-destructive (kicking and hitting others, throwing and breaking objects), oral aggression (biting and spitting on others) and self-injurious (hitting and biting self, holding breath and head banging). The occasional or isolated extreme tantrum is usually not a worry – what parents should watch out for is a pattern within the tantrums. It is recommended that parents seek help if:

1. The tantrums last longer than 15 minutes.
2. The tantrums get worse or they continue after the age of 4.
3. During the tantrum, the child injures themselves, others or destroys property.
4. A child has frequent tantrums each day for an extended stretch (eg: every day for a month).

You are uncertain as to how to safely handle their tantrum or feel like you aren’t coping with their behaviour.

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Selfish And Combative People Don’t Actually Get Ahead At Work

By Emily Reynolds

In popular culture, there’s an idea that lots of successful people are… well, not that nice. From Glengarry Glen Ross to The Apprentice, there’s a litany of bad bosses and aggressive success stories in film and television. The message seems to be that to get ahead you need to ditch the niceties and think about number one.

This stereotype might not reflect what’s really going on, however. In a new longitudinal study published in PNAS, a team from the University of California, Berkeley and Colby College tracked individuals over a fourteen year period, looking to see what became of those who were more disagreeable (not a cohort many of us would particularly long to be in).

They found that selfish, combative, and manipulative people have no real advantage at work — not because there are no benefits to such behaviour, but because its positive and negative impacts cancel each other out.

In the first study, Cameron Anderson and colleagues measured the Big Five personality traits of 457 participants during their university years. Then fourteen years later, when those participants were in the workforce, the team assessed participants’ power in the organisation, their view of their influence in the workplace, and organisational culture — how aggressive, criticising, political or selfish a participant felt it was.

Those who were most disagreeable at the first measurement did not have more power at the second, regardless of their age, gender or ethnicity — suggesting that selfishness and aggression do not result in higher levels of power or attainment.

In the second study, the team looked more closely at workplace behaviours in another group which had been followed in a similar way. Behaviours were grouped into four categories: dominant behaviour (e.g. “I am willing to bully others to achieve important goals”), political behaviour (e.g. “I build alliances with important people”), communal behaviour (e.g. “I care about others’ wellbeing”) and competent behaviour (e.g. “I make important contributions to my team’s success”). Importantly, coworkers also rated participants on these same workplace behaviours, as well power and organisational rank.

Coworker ratings largely agreed not only with one another but also with participants’ own ratings of themselves, suggesting that self-insight was fairly accurate. And the results showed that those who engaged in more dominant, political, communal and competent behaviour had higher levels of power. Personality-wise, people who were more extraverted 14 years previously engaged more in each of these categories, doing “everything right”, as the team put it, to attain higher power. Those with disagreeable personalities, however, only engaged in more dominant behaviours — and fewer communal ones.

So whilst dominant behaviour might get you ahead in some ways, it’s clear that other, more prosocial, types of behaviour are also a key part of the process. If you’re a disagreeable person, being selfish might enhance your power to some extent, but failing to be generous and kind can cancel this out.

This might not be the case, however, in certain environments — if you work in an industry where prosocial behaviour is neither valued nor particularly useful, disagreeable people may be more likely to reach positions of power.

Future research could take the opposite approach: do people become more selfish and disagreeable once they’re in positions of power, and do those kinds of traits help them keep it? It may be that power really does corrupt — or we might find that it’s mere tropes around aggression that perpetuate the myth that nice guys finish last.

– People with disagreeable personalities (selfish, combative, and manipulative) do not have an advantage in pursuing power at work

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Backpacks And Bird Brains: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

Many birds have impressive cognitive abilities such as good memory, tool-making talents, and problem-solving skills — yet they don’t have the part of the brain called the neocortex which is key to those abilities in mammals. But now researchers have discovered that a region of the pigeon brain called the pallium seems to be organised in a similar way to mammals’ neocortex, reports Virginia Morell at Science, suggesting it is responsible for bird cognition.

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Most of us would go out of our way to avoid hurting others. But why do some people “harm the harmless”? At The Conversation, Simon McCarthy-Jones has written a primer on psychopathy, sadism, and “dark” personality traits

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In a new preprint, researchers report finding changes in the volume of certain brain areas after the COVID-19 lockdown. A total of 50 volunteers were scanned in Israel in 2019 and then again in May-July 2020, after the country’s first lockdown. The team found increases in the volume of the amygdala and nearby regions, which they suggest could relate to emotional stress. At Discover Magazine, Neuroskeptic takes a more detailed look at the study, with — as you’d expect — a healthy dose of scepticism.

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Neuroscientists have created a prototype backpack that can take EEG measurements and provide brain stimulation — and it even includes a virtual reality system too. The device could allow researchers to study brain function while people are moving around, writes Rebekah Tuchscherer at Science, though only patients with neural implants are able to use it.

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People of African ancestry are underrepresented in genetics and neuroscience research. At NPR, Jon Hamilton has the story of an initiative seeking to change that.

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What causes people to stutter? Research has suggested that stuttering could be related to different patterns of connectivity within the brain, or increased levels of dopamine. Some studies have implicated mutations in particular genes as well. At BBC Future, Amber Dance examines the evidence.

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Skin-to-skin contact could reduce newborn babies’ neural response to pain, reports Jason Goodyer at BBC Science Focus. Researchers found a dampened pattern of brain activity in response to a needle prick when mothers held their baby against their skin rather than against their clothing. However it remains to be seen whether this altered response actually relates to reduced perception of pain.  

Compiled by Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren), Editor of BPS Research Digest

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Even When You’re A Member Of An Elite Group, It Can Be Demoralising To Rank Lower Than Your Peers

By Matthew Warren

Imagine that you are a high-achieving student at a school which, overall, doesn’t perform that well. You know that your grades are better than most of your peers’, so you probably rate your academic ability quite high. You are, in other words, a big fish in a small pond. 

Now you transfer to a school in which the other students consistently get top marks, perhaps even better than yours. You’re now the small fish in a big pond, and although your own ability has remained the same, you begin to doubt yourself and actually rate yourself lower than you had before.

This “big-fish-little-pond” effect shows that our academic self-concept can be profoundly shaped by how we compare ourselves to our peers. Now a study in Social Psychological and Personality Science has found that the size of this comparison matters: the effect is even more pronounced when people are extremely high achieving in very low ranked groups, or vice-versa.

It might seem obvious that when people make more extreme comparisons with their peers, their self-evaluations should receive more of a boost (or take more of a hit, depending on the direction of that comparison). But as Ethan Zell and Tara Lesick from the University of North Carolina note in their new paper, no-one had actually looked into this.

In the first study, the pair asked 187 people to complete a verbal reasoning test which involved completing sentences. Participants were then told that the same task had been completed by other students from their own university, as well as students from 39 other universities.

Participants received different information about how they had done relative to their peers at their university, and how well their university scored compared to the other institutions. There were four conditions: big-fish-little-pond (participants did better than 65% of peers; university ranked better than 35% of other institutions); little-fish-big-pond (participants did better than 35% of their peers; university ranked better than 65% of others); huge-fish-tiny-pond (participants did better than 85% of peers; university ranked above just 15% of others); and tiny-fish-huge-pond (participants did better than only 15% of peers; university outranked 85% of others).

Participants then rated their own verbal ability and performance on the test. As expected, big fish in little ponds — i.e. those who read that they were somewhat above average in a somewhat below average group — gave themselves better self-evaluations than little fish in big ponds. But this effect was accentuated for the other two conditions: huge fish in tiny ponds — i.e. those who read that they were far above average in a far below average group — rated themselves as even better than big fish. Tiny fish in huge ponds rated themselves as even worse than little fish.

In a subsequent study, the team looked at what happened to this effect when people also received information about their overall level of performance. This is important because in a group that is far above average, someone who scores well below average for that group could still have a pretty good objective performance.

In this study, some participants in the huge-fish-tiny-pond condition were told they had done better than 35% of all American test-takers, while some in the tiny-fish-huge-pond condition were told they had done better than 65% of Americans.  This meant that participants in the huge-fish-tiny-pond group were 30 percentile points lower than those in the tiny-fish-huge-pond group. And yet, the effect still occurred (albeit at a smaller scale): they rated their abilities as higher than those in the latter group.

Finally, the researchers found evidence that this effect is driven by people focussing on their own rank within a group, rather than on how their group compares to others. Participants ranked extremely highly in their group rated their abilities as high no matter whether the group was itself of high or low rank. Similarly, those who ranked low in their group rated their ability as low, regardless of their group’s rank.

Overall the work shows that even if you are a member of an elite group, it can be demoralising to learn that you are a “tiny fish” who is performing worse than your peers, the authors write. Further work is needed to see whether this effect extends to real-world situations, and explore what its repercussions are for people’s career and study choices.

– Taking Social Comparison to the Extremes: The Huge-Fish-Tiny-Pond Effect in Self-Evaluations

Matthew Warren (@MattBWarren) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

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Pro-Environmental Beliefs Are Less Likely To Lead To Action Among Those Who Believe In A Controlling God

By Emma Young

We all know that it’s vital that we take action to reduce the harm we do to the environment. So understanding the barriers to such action is critical, too. A new paper, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, identifies a potentially important one: when people believe that it’s important to protect the environment, they’re less likely to act on those beliefs if they’re more religious.

Kimin Eom at Singapore Management University and colleagues studied Americans — and when they talk about people being “religious”, they’re really talking about being Christian. These caveats are important to highlight up front.

In the first of three studies, the team analysed pre-existing data on a nationally representative sample of 3,052 US adults. They looked specifically at answers to three categories of questions. Firstly, questions assessed how strongly an individual endorsed the ideas that a) the world is getting hotter; and b) human activity is an important driver of this. Secondly, questions related to “religiosity” — a) their belief in the importance of religion; and b) how often they attend religious services. Finally, the team looked at responses to questions that assessed their level of support for pro-environmental policies.

The researchers found that climate change beliefs predicted support for pro-environmental policy less strongly among individuals higher in religiosity. In other words, “These results supported the idea that environmental beliefs are less in line with pro-environmental support among those who are more, relative to less, religious.” These results held even when team took into account/controlled for a range of demographic variables, including political orientation, gender, income, education, age and ethnicity.

In a second study, the team dug deeper into this finding. A total of 424 US students, half from a Christian college and half from a non-religious public university, both in California, completed a series of questionnaires. The first scale explored the extent to which they believed in climate change. The second measured religiosity. The third measured how strongly the participants believed in a “controlling god” — a god who has a plan and controls events in the world. They were then asked to report how often they would perform six environmentally friendly behaviours (such as buying green products instead of regular products and unplugging appliances at night) over the next six months.

The participants also gave demographic data — and a few potentially important differences between the groups stood out. Namely, the Christian college students were more likely to be Republican and there were fewer women in the Christian group. The team took these group differences into account in their analysis, which revealed that higher religiosity was associated with a stronger belief in a controlling god — and it was the strength of this belief (rather than religiosity per se) that affected their intentions to act in a more environmentally friendly way. (Those with the strongest beliefs in a controlling god were the least likely to indicate that they’d be engaging in such behaviours.)

Why should this be the case? The authors argue that, if you believe that a god controls what happens in the world, you are less likely to think that any actions that you take will change any given outcome — and so you are less likely to change your behaviour.

The results from these studies were correlational, however. To explore the idea that belief in a controlling god makes people less likely to act to help the environment, the team ran a third study with 730 Christians. The team measured their environmental beliefs as before. Half then read a passage that described God as the ultimate controller of the world. This was designed to prime them with the idea that God is controlling. The other read an article about why Pluto had been declassified as a planet (a text chosen to have no influence on attitudes to God). Participants also rated the extent to which four adjectives (controlling, commanding, caring, compassionate ) described a god. Next, their intentions to behave in a pro-environmental way were assessed (as in the previous study) and they provided demographic data.

Climate change beliefs predicted intentions to behave pro-environmentally less strongly when a participant had a stronger concept of God as being controlling. Or to put it another way, believing in a controlling god “weakens the association between environmental beliefs and pro-environmental support”. This study confirms that it’s the belief in a controlling god, rather than a belief in God per se, that weakens that association, the team argues.

As already noted, though, the religious people in this study were Christians, and they were all American. So the findings may or may not extend to people with other religious beliefs. Also, these studies featured a lot of self-report and assessments of “intention” to act. It would of course be interesting to know whether belief in a controlling god makes any difference to actual, real world behaviour.

However, as the researchers also point out, when it comes to understanding which sociocultural factors influence environmental attitudes and behaviour, there is still a lot to learn. This work at least starts to plug part of that gap.  

– Religiosity Moderates the Link Between Environmental Beliefs and Pro-Environmental Support: The Role of Belief in a Controlling God

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Suicide Unpacked: Risk Factors and Warning Signs

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How Covid-19 is changing the workplace & the role HRM can play

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the way we work and adding new and unfamiliar pressure on organisations, leaders and employees. In this webinar, we ask the big question: “How can Human Resource Management (HRM) practitioners respond and help ease the stress associated with an ever-moving landscape?”

Industrial Organisational Psychologist, Ashley Motene, and Organisation Development Consultant, Beatrice Attrill, discussed a variety of themes relating to organisational changes. Elaborating on how these changes are influencing people management education, training and practice.

In this webinar along with input, questions and solutions from our attendees, watch as our experts discuss the shifting workplace.

What is Human Resource Management?

Human Resource Management encompasses numerous people-related processes such as recruiting, selecting, providing orientation, motivating employees. As well as ensuring employees safety, welfare and healthy measures in compliance with labour laws of the land, among others. Never has this field of expertise been more relevant in the workforce before.

If you’re interested in a degree that develops critical skills to help you lead the way in contemporary and impactful human resource management (HRM). Apply online today.

SACAP offers a Bachelor of Applied Social Science majoring in Psychology and Human Resource Management (HRM), designed to develop robust knowledge, skills and understanding of the human resource theories. As well as practices, methodologies and competencies in the field. Equipping you with the necessary toolkit to function effectively and meaningfully in a human resource role. Successful graduates are then eligible for admission to both the HRM honours degree or postgraduate studies in psychology.

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Adults Put Off Crucial Conversations About Race Because They Mistakenly Think Young Children Won’t Understand

By Emily Reynolds

Conversations about race are not always easy, as the writer Reni Eddo-Lodge has recently explored in her brilliant book Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race. But they’re no less necessary for it: not talking about racism is simply not an option, particularly for those of us who benefit from structural inequality.

We all have a part to play in this ongoing dialogue — including parents of children growing up in a world full of racial injustice. Previous research has suggested that constructive conversations about race and ethnicity can have positive outcomes for children of all races — increased empathy, an ability to learn about and accept different perspectives, a better understanding of their own identity, and less racial bias.

But a new paper from Jessica Sullivan at Skidmore College and colleagues, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, suggests that those crucial conversations are being delayed — because parents are misjudging their children’s ability to process and understand race.

In the first two studies, the researchers asked almost 1,200 participants to indicate on a sliding scale the earliest age at which they would talk to children about race. Participants also stated what age, in months, they believed children developed certain behaviours and abilities. These questions focused on three areas: development of behaviours around race (e.g. the age at which children begin to prefer faces from their own racial groups), social development (e.g. the age at which children can tell faces from non-faces), and general development (e.g. the age at which children can recognise their mother’s voice). Some were about relatively less complex processes, such as recognising faces of different races, while others concerned higher level processes, such as inferring the status of group members by race.

Compared to the best estimate from scientific research, participants were out by less than a year in their estimates of children’s general development and by two years for social development — but by four years for race questions, vastly overestimating the age that children begin to develop race-related capacities. Participants also stated that conversations about race should first happen around a child’s fifth birthday, and their beliefs weren’t influenced by their race, age, sex, experience with children or how diverse their everyday environment is.

The third study looked at the causal relationship between these factors — if participants had better knowledge of developmental milestones, would it increase their willingness to talk to children about race at an earlier age? To find out, the team randomly assigned 328 participants to one of three categories in which they saw pieces of information related to either children’s ability to understand race (e.g. “Babies spontaneously prefer faces from particular racial groups at around three months of age”), adult interpretation of race, and general child development.

It seemed to work. Those who read facts about children’s abilities to understand race estimated the age of development of these capacities at less than 18 months from the best scientific estimates — and they endorsed discussing race with children a year earlier than participants who learned about adults and race.

Of course, it’s unclear when the optimal age to start talking to children about race is, but given that increased knowledge was certainly good for adults, it makes sense that children would benefit from explicit conversations too, as previous research has shown.

A better understanding of how to talk about race with children might also help. Another recent paper, written by Katharine E. Scott and a team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, found scant evidence for the effectiveness of various parental interventions for reducing racial biases in children, and called for other researchers to develop “supported, specific, shareable suggestions” for parents wanting to engage their children in conversations about race.

It would also be useful to explore differences in approaches in such conversations between parents of different races: although in this study participant race made no difference to knowledge about children’s developmental milestones, the team acknowledges that a Black family is unlikely to talk about race in the same way as a White family.

What we know for sure is that children are growing up in a heavily racialised world — and it’s children of colour who are feeling the brunt of that, experiencing racial discrimination well before they even reach adolescence. Having simple conversations with your children can’t undo structural inequality — but it should be considered a vital part of children’s socialisation. 

– Adults delay conversations about race because they underestimate children’s processing of race.

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com