Children and adults display an “anti-convert” bias

• In Event: Who belongs here? Children's attitudes about immigration and nationality

Abstract

Changing group affiliations is common in contemporary society. For example, as of 2017, 22 million citizens in the United States (~7% of the population) are naturalized, meaning they immigrated to the U.S. and became citizens rather than being born citizens (Zong et al., 2019). Unfortunately, new immigrants are sometimes disliked, mistrusted, and viewed as atypical, and world leaders regularly gain popularity via anti-immigrant platforms. Here, we investigate the generality of bias against social group “converts” (i.e., people who change their social groups). Is this bias specific to highly salient social identities like nationality or religion, or is it a general feature of intergroup reasoning? We explore this question by asking whether children and adults are biased against converts to previously unfamiliar novel groups. If anti-convert bias is early-emerging and general, then young children should prefer and trust “lifelong” members of a novel group (i.e., people who haven’t converted and who have always been a member of that group) more than converts to that same group.  
 
Across two pre-registered studies, we introduced 5- to 10-year-old children (n=284) and adults (n=236) to a novel social group and asked them to rate how much another member of the group would like both a convert and a lifelong member. We also asked how much the participants themselves liked and trusted both the convert and the lifelong member. In Study 1, we simply showed participants novel groups. In Study 2, participants were either told that the novel groups were in competition with one another (Competitive condition) or they were told a general story without any mention of competition (Uncompetitive condition; manipulations were adapted from Rhodes & Brickman, 2011).
 
Across both studies, we found that children as young as five years old expected others to hold an “anti-convert” bias, meaning they expected people to like lifelong members of their group more than converts to their group. Moreover, in our second study, this bias increased with age. For adults, competitive contexts strengthened this expectation of “anti-convert” bias among group members.  
 
Additionally, we found that children and adults alike were biased against converts themselves, both liking and trusting lifelong members of a novel group more than converts. With age, children were more likely to report trusting the lifelong target more than the convert. Further, adults’ political affiliation and the extent to which they value loyalty (as measured by the loyalty items from the Moral Foundations Questionnaire; Graham et al., 2008) both predicted their first-party evaluations: The more conservative a participant was, or the more they valued loyalty, the more likely they reported liking and trusting the lifelong target more than the convert.
 
As early as in kindergarten, children display a bias against social group converts, and also expect others to be biased against converts. This bias is present even when children are shown novel groups that they are not a part of themselves, suggesting that anti-immigrant bias and other anti-convert sentiments stem from this general aspect of intergroup reasoning. Future work will address how to mitigate “anti-convert” bias.

Authors

• Emily Rachel Gonsier Gerdin, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Yarrow C Dunham, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author