Margaret Beale Spencer

Margaret Beale Spencer is an American psychologist whose work centers on the effects of ethnicity, gender, and race on youth and adolescent development. She currently serves as the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Dr. Spencer's career spans more than 30 years and consists of over 115 published articles and chapters, stemming from work funded by over two-dozen foundations and federal agencies.

Margaret Beale Spencer received her master's degree from the University of Kansas, and went on to receive her PhD in Child and Developmental Psychology from the University of Chicago in 1976.

She taught in both the psychology and education departments at Emory University before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directed the W. E. B. Du Bois Collective Research Institute as well as the Center for Health Achievement Neighborhood Growth and Ethnic Studies (CHANGES).

Since 2009, she has served as the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.

Spencer master's thesis, titled "Effects of Systematic Social and Token Reinforcement on the Modification of Racial and Color Concept Attitudes in Black and in White Preschool Children," was inspired by the doll studies of Kenneth and Mamie Clark and investigated whether children's racial beliefs and preferences could be modified by incentives.

The study included 24 Black and 24 White children between the ages of 3-5, who all attended a Head Start program serving lower-class families. In the control condition, children were asked to choose between drawings of Black or White animals and children; this baseline found that the children in the study showed a 70% - 80% bias towards the White stimuli. In the experimental condition, a Black or White mechanized puppet taught the children to choose the Black stimuli by rewarding them with marbles; this intervention reduced bias towards the White stimulus to only 40%.

Spencer concluded that the children had learned implicit biases during their childhood, but that the initial preference towards White stimulus could be reversed with incentives, suggesting that initial bias was more related to learned attitudes than an internalized self-hatred as suggested by the Clarks.

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