Now you see race, now you don’t: Verbal cues influence children’s racial stability judgments

•Young white children do not consistently expect race to be stable from childhood to adulthood.•For children (ages 5–10), but not adults, verbal cues influence the extent to which race is judged to be stable.•Minority children are more likely than white children to reason that race is stable across the lifespan, and are less susceptible to verbal cues.

Research suggests that young children do not consistently believe that race is stable (e.g., that a Black child will grow up to be a Black adult). Here, we tested the strength of White and minority children’s beliefs by testing whether verbal cues influenced the extent to which they believed in the relative stability of race versus emotional expression. We presented participants (5–6 years, 9–10 years, adults) with images of children who were Black or White, and happy or angry, and asked them to indicate which of two adults each child would grow up to be: one matching on emotion but not race, or one matching on race but not emotion. Verbal cuing had strong effects on both younger and older children's choices (e.g., cuing emotional expressions strengthened emotion-matches; cuing skin color strengthened race-matches), although racial minorities were less susceptible to cuing. Verbal cues had weaker effects on children's judgments about the stability of gender. These results show that race concepts vary across age and racial groups, that verbal framing influences younger and older children’s beliefs about racial stability, and that belief in racial stability is relatively weak between the ages of 5 and 10.