Canadian Host Society Children’s Kindness Toward Refugee Newcomer Peers: The Role of Moral Pride

• In Event: Facilitating Positive Intergroup Relations: Research on Children’s and Adolescents’ Out-Group Prosociality

Abstract

About half of the world’s global refugee population are children under the age of 18 (UNHCR, 2018). Helping refugee newcomer children integrate into their host societies is important not only for their healthy development, but also for the maintenance of social harmony within host societies. Moral pride (i.e., positive feelings rooted in internalized ethical standards that follow a moral accomplishment) may be important for catalyzing intergroup prosociality due to its role in motivating and sustaining prosocial action. Here, we examined whether host society children’s moral pride following interactions with refugee newcomer peers (compared to host-society peers) was associated with their prosocial behavior toward refugee newcomers.
Participants were 364 ethnically diverse children from Canada ages 6, 9, and 12 years. Using a vignette procedure, children imagined that they engaged in costly prosocial behavior toward a same-age, same-gender protagonist. In the in-group condition (n = 186), the protagonist was a host-society peer and in the out-group condition (n = 178), the protagonist was a refugee newcomer. Children then reported how they felt following the prosocial act, how strongly they felt their reported emotions (from 1 = not much to 3 = very much), and their reasoning. Positively valenced emotions and ethical reasoning (i.e., reasoning pertaining to fairness and care) were combined and multiplied by reported intensities, resulting in a 4-point scale from 0 (no moral pride reported) to 3 (strong moral pride reported). Prosocial behavior was measured via a donation task wherein children were given the opportunity to share chocolate coins with a refugee newcomer peer in need (proportional scores from 0 = no coins donated to 1 = all coins donated). We controlled for children’s item preference (i.e., how much they like chocolate coins, 1 = not much to 3 = a lot), dispositional prosocial behavior (via the Prosocial Subscale of the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire; Goodman, 1997), and refugee contact (i.e., whether children knew a refugee newcomer, 1 = yes, 0 = no) in our analyses.
Results revealed age-related differences in donation, F(2, 353) = 58.53, p < .001, η2 = .25 (see Figure 1). No significant condition nor age by condition differences were found in children’s moral pride. Multi-group analyses revealed that moral pride in the out-group condition (but not in-group condition) was positively associated with donation to refugee newcomer peers (see Table 1). However, when comparing the χ2 values of the constrained model to the freely estimated model, model fit results were non-significant, χ2 (1) = 0.37, p = 0.54. Thus, focusing on findings from our overall model, we see that stronger moral pride, regardless of condition, was associated with higher donations to refugee newcomer peers.
Together, these findings extend research on children’s intergroup kindness by showing that moral pride may be important for children’s out-group prosociality, likely because it acts as an intrinsic reinforcement for kindness. These findings have implications for interventions targeting the inclusion of refugee newcomers into post-migratory communities.

Authors

• Joanna Peplak, University of California - Irvine
  Presenting Author

• Tina Malti, University of Toronto