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At birth, newborns preferentially listen to their native language over a non-native language. Soon thereafter, infants prefer to listen to their native dialect over a non-native dialect, and look longer at their own race than another race. This shows that they can discriminate between different languages, dialects, and racial groups. But do they form social preferences based on these distinctions? Would a young baby or child prefer to take a toy from an unfamiliar person who speaks the same or different language, from the same or different race? To answer these questions, the American psychologist Katharine Kinzler put 5 months old babies to a test. Babies born into mono-racial and mono-lingual families sat on their mother’s lap in front of two monitors, each presenting short video clips of different people. After watching the videos, Kinzler created a bit of magic. The people in the monitor appeared to emerge from the 2D image and offer the baby a toy. The trick: a real person, hidden beneath the monitor, synchronized her reach with the reach in the monitor. Who would the baby choose given that both people offered the same toy? Babies preferred people speaking the native over non-native language, and native-accent over the non-native accent. At this young age, however, they showed no preference for native over non-native race. Thus, early in life the connection between discrimination and social preference is well established for language, but not race. When do things change for race? Kinzler carried out another series of experiments on race with one group of 2.5 year old children and a second group of 5-year olds. Though the methods were somewhat different, they both focused on the child’s preferences, including who they would share toys with and who they would prefer as friends. The 2.5 year olds showed no preferences, whereas the 5 year olds preferred their own race. Race is therefore a slowly developing category, at least in terms of its impact on social preferences, and especially when contrasted with both language and accent. Kinzler took these studies one step further to explore whether there is anything like a hierarchy among these social categories and the features that define them. What’s more important to a young child building an inner sanctum of trusted others —race, language, or dialect? Would they rather interact with someone of the same race who speaks a foreign language or someone of a different race who speaks the native language? Using similar procedures, Kinzler showed that by 4-5 years of age, language trumps race. Children would rather interact with someone from a different race speaking the same language than someone of the same race speaking a foreign language. Why would language trump race? Kinzler's answer relies on an idea developed by the American evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban. Imagine a hunter-gatherer in South Africa, living during the earliest stages of our evolutionary history. As individuals searched for food to eat, areas to sleep, water to drink, and places to avoid, they came across other individuals. These individuals were always members of the same race. Racial differences did not emerge until relatively late in human evolution, well after our Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 95 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012841