研究者们证明，对构建社交圈来说，口音比种族更重要。相比说话带外国口音的白人小孩，白人儿童更喜欢说纯正英语的黑人小孩。
为什么口音比人种起了更大的作用？Kinzler表示，种族概念在人类进化过程中可能出现得比较晚，在史前时代，其他部落的人即使外表看起来没什么不一样，可能口音也不同。而对自身人种的认同和喜爱可能是后来才出现的。
original report on Scientific American
Going one step further, Kinzler and her team showed that an accent is more meaningful than race in signifying whether someone belongs in your social group. Replicating previous research, they found that under silent conditions children chose as potential friends children of the same race. Yet when the potential friends spoke, white children preferred a black child speaking with a native accent over a white child who spoke English with a foreign accent.
Why was accent more important than race? “Race, as a psychological category, may be relatively modern in terms of human evolution,” explains Kinzler, now at the University of Chicago. In prehistoric times, “a neighboring group might have sounded different even if they did not look different,” she says. Preference for our own race might have developed later, after the more ancient preference for our own accent.
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