Liking another group doesn’t mean you dislike your own: New study provides insight into famous, 80-year-old ‘dolls test’ research

More than 70 years ago, a pair of psychologists conducted a study in which they asked young Black girls to choose between Black and white dolls. The girls overwhelmingly chose white dolls, ascribing positive attributes to them.

The Black girls’ choices and reasoning were interpreted by study authors to indicate “a feeling of inferiority among African-American children and damaged… self-esteem.”

The die was cast in psychology discourse: If you like a group to which you don’t belong — an “outgroup” — it’s because you have bad feelings about your own group — your “ingroup.”

A UC Riverside study involving more than 879,000 participants published this week challenges the assumption that liking an outgroup means disliking your ingroup.

“Our findings suggest that outgroup preference does not necessarily reflect negative feelings about the ingroup as much as it reflects positive feelings about the outgroup,” said Jimmy Calanchini, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Riverside and lead author of the study.

In the 1940s study, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark used four dolls, identical except for color, and asked young Black girls questions such as which doll they would play with and which is “the nice doll.” The girls chose the white dolls, leading the researchers to famously conclude that a Black child by the age of 5 is aware that “to be colored in… American society is a mark of inferior status.” The study was subsequently used as supporting evidence in the 1954 landmark desegregation ruling Brown v. Board of Education.

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