U.S. children’s evaluations of immigrants are predicted by their parent’s values

• In Event: The direct roles of parents and teachers as socialization agents for dominant ideologies

Abstract

In the United States, immigration has become an especially divisive political issue, with Republicans favoring strict deportation laws, and Democrats favoring more accessible paths to citizenship (Pew Research Center, 2022). Moreover, adults’ attitudes toward immigration coalesce with their attitudes towards immigrants themselves—more ideologically conservative adults tend to hold stronger anti-immigrant attitudes (Cohrs & Stelzl, 2010). Recently, scholars have argued that even young children possess proto-political attitudes that are predicted by their parent’s ideological leanings (see Reifen-Tagar & Cimpian, 2022). In the present research, we explored whether U.S. children’s evaluations of immigrants to and from the U.S. are predicted by their parent’s political and moral values.

We told 5- to 10-year-old U.S. citizens (N=266) information about two countries: the United States (their home country) and Andorra (an unfamiliar country). Then, we told children about either a lifelong American (n=66), a lifelong Andorran (n=67), someone born Andorran who immigrated to the U.S. (American immigrant; n=69), or someone who born American but who immigrated to Andorra (Andorran immigrant; n=64). We then asked children to make several evaluations of the character they were shown, including their perception of the character’s trustworthiness (“Do you think [character] keeps their promises?”) and warmth (“Do you think [character] is nice?”). We asked participants’ parents to share their political affiliation (5-point scale: 0=very liberal…4=very conservative) and to answer six questions designed to gauge the extent to which a person values loyalty (6-point scale: 0=strongly disagree…5=strongly agree; Graham et al., 2008).

Parent political conservatism and the extent to which a parent values loyalty predicted children’s ratings of the character’s trustworthiness. Specifically, both parent loyalty scores (p < .004) and parent political conservatism (p < .008) interacted with the character’s immigration status such that the more a parent valued loyalty/the more politically conservative a parent was, the less likely their child thought it would be for an immigrant to keep their promises—regardless of the immigrant’s country of origin— and the more likely they thought a lifelong citizen would keep their promises—regardless of whether the character was an ingroup (i.e., American) or outgroup (i.e., Andorran) member. See Figure 1.

Parent loyalty scores—but not parent political conservatism—predicted children’s perceptions of the character’s warmth. Specifically, parent loyalty scores interacted with the character’s immigration status (p < .015) such that the more a participant’s parent valued loyalty, the less likely to be nice the participant reported an immigrant being (again regardless of the immigrant’s country of origin), and the more likely to be nice they reported a lifelong citizen being (again, regardless of ingroup/outgroup status). See Figure 2.

Our work suggests that parent political ideology and certain moral values, such as the extent they value loyalty, predict some of U.S. children’s social evaluations of immigrants as early as in kindergarten. In follow-up work, we will investigate whether other scales measuring parent values (such as right-wing authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation) also predict children’s judgments of immigrants, and further which parent measure is the strongest predictor of children’s attitudes.

Authors

• Emily Rachel Gonsier Gerdin, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Yarrow C Dunham, Yale University