Previous studies of preschool children in the United States and Western Europe had demonstrated a bias favoring the color white relative to the color black, and a bias favoring light-skinned human figures. In this study, procedures used in previous studies were translated and administered to Japanese preschoolers, aged 40 to 73 months. Both types of bias were found among the Japanese children indicating that pro-white and pro-light-skinned biases are not confined to Western groups. An interesting difference was the indication that the biases were more highly correlated with age among Japanese children and, hence, seemed more likely to be attributable to cultural learning.
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