Effect of Melodic and Labeling Individuation Training on Young Children's Implicit and Explicit Outgroup Biases

Individuation is the tendency to treat targets according to their unique traits and characteristics and not their categorical memberships such as race, gender, age, etc. An individual’s musical identity can be considered a unique trait or characteristic; therefore, the purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of melodic and labeling individuation training on young children’s implicit and explicit outgroup biases. Forty-two young children served as participants and were assigned to one of three conditions: melodic individuation training, labeling individuation training, and mere exposure as a control condition. Pretests and immediate, intermediate, and long-term posttests were administered on the Implicit Racial Bias Test (Qian et al., 2017a, 2017b) and a sociometric explicit racial bias test. Significant differences were found between time points using IRBT test scores. Significant differences found were short-term. No significant differences were found between groups using IRBT scores. Further, no interactions between the two factors were found using IRBT scores. No significant differences were found between time points or conditions using explicit racial bias test scores. Further, no interactions between the two factors were found using explicit racial bias test scores. Descriptive analysis showed lower IRBT scores for the melodic individuation training condition than other groups at all time points following the pretest. Open-ended questions following the sociometric explicit racial bias test revealed that participants most frequently cited facial features, clothing, and fantasized scenarios as reasons why they selected targets in hypothetical relationship scenarios. The findings of this study indicate, that for this population, melodic individuation training may be an effective intervention for reducing short-term implicit racial bias scores; however, explicit racial bias may be more resistant to remediation.