Study Reveals Racial Bias and Empathy Deficit Among Preschool Teachers (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: It was a new study out of the Yale Child Study Center that I had to read a few times just to believe what it was telling me. The researchers recruited about 135 preschool teachers. They had them watch video footage of four kids playing, a black boy, a black girl, a white boy, and a white girl. And they told the teachers, their subjects, watch the video, there may be some challenging behaviors. As soon as you see something that could become challenging, hit the Enter key on your keypad. Well, here's the trick. There was no challenging behavior. The researchers were using eye scan technology to see which child the teachers were looking at the most. And what they found is that the teachers, both white and black alike, spent the most time watching the black boy, waiting for bad behavior that never came. There's one more really interesting headline in the study, which comes later. The teachers were also given a one-paragraph description to read of a hypothetical child with a stereotypical name who behaves pretty badly in class, pushes, scratches, throws toys. And some of the teachers were also given some biographical information that helped make sense of that behavior. They were told that the child lives with his mother, a father has been in and out for years, they're relatively poor, the mother is depressed, works three jobs. Researchers wanted to know if knowing this information made the teachers more empathetic to the kid. Well, here's the shock. It did, but only if the teacher and the child were of the same race. If the teacher and the child, a white teacher and a black child, or even a black teacher and a white child, knowing that biographical information, those teachers were less empathetic towards those students. And here's why this matters. Imagine if this is true, if there's this empathy deficit in preschool, well, imagine where else that's true.