Oliver Morton’s Twitter feed today contained a link to a new article on the Nature web site. It reports on a study of children with a rare neurological condition called Williams Syndrome that causes them to never develop a fear of strangers. The study concludes that such children also do not develop racial stereotypes. It is the clearest connection yet between racism and fear of “the other”.

Obviously such studies are highly controversial and I recommend that you read the Nature article before making “yes, but” comments. The authors of the study do seem to have tried hard to control for external factors. They do not draw any conclusions about whether genetic factors are involved in developing stereotypes. Because the syndrome is rare, the numbers involved in the study are inevitably small.

Another interesting result of the study is that the Williams Syndrome kids appear to have developed exactly the same gender stereotypes as kids without the condition. It isn’t clear whether there is a different mechanism involved here, or if the result is simply a consequence of gender stereotypes being developed at an earlier age.