"Friend or Foe?" (Do babies expect friendship based on race and language?)

For babies 8 to 14 months, lives in the USA

Your child will be shown videos of two people of the same or different racial and linguistic backgrounds talking or cleaning up actions and then interacting with each other. We will measure how long your child looks at these videos. We will ask you (the parent) to turn around, close your eyes, or look down to avoid influencing your child's responses. We will also ask you to fill out a demographic survey (e.g., racial and linguistic information of parents and child) and your zip code. An optional survey will ask about the people your child sees regularly.

In this study, we are looking at whether infants have different expectations about how people from the same racial and linguistic background versus different racial and linguistic backgrounds interact. Past research suggests that infants look longer at things they are suprised by. Thus, we will measure how long your child looks at individuals of the same/different racial and linguistic backgrounds acting as friends, or not as friends (i.e., turning and waving at each other or turning away and crossing their arms). We are also interested in how infants’ own experience with people from diverse racial and linguistic backgrounds relate to their expectations. This study will help us understand how babies start to pay attention to groups based on race and language and how early social experiences can shape this attention.

15 minutes (and the optional survey will take another ~15 minutes).

We will email you a $5 gift card from U.S. Amazon.com within approximately a week. You can earn an additional $5 gift card from U.S. Amazon.com if you fill out an optional, external survey linked at the end of the study. To be eligible for the gift card your child must be in the age range for this study, you need to submit a valid consent statement, and we need to see that there is a child with you. We will send a gift card even if you do not finish the whole study or we are not able to use your child's data.