Poster #198 - Development of social preferences and categories based on ethno-religious symbols in post-conflict Northern Ireland

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Children demonstrate early ingroup preferences for relevant social categories. However, research on children’s early social categorization has typically focused on categories that are visibly differentiated (e.g., gender, race; Aboud, 1988). Here, we investigate when, and how, children attend to symbolic ingroup-outgroup distinctions when relevant social groups may be less highly visible, such as ethno-religious categories in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Furthermore, we investigate factors that influence the development of children’s knowledge about and preferences for ethno-religious symbols. Understanding children’s social categorization in divided societies can inform strategies for peacebuilding.
Five- to eleven-year-old children (N=317, Mage=7.63, 51% female/49% male; 53% Catholic/47% Protestant) in Northern Ireland participated in three tasks presented in a random order via Qualtrics. Across all tasks, an experimenter presented children with pairs of photos representing comparable cultural symbols from each of the two dominant ethno-religious backgrounds (e.g., Irish vs. British flag; Figure 1). In the first-person preference task, children picked which of two images they preferred across 10 trials; higher scores indicated a stronger preference for ingroup images. In the third-person preference task, children were introduced to a gender-matched line drawing of a fictitious child and told “This is a [boy/girl] from Northern Ireland. He is [British/Irish/Catholic/Protestant].” Participants then chose which image the other child would like better across 10 trials. In the categorization task, children selected which of a pair of images was [British/Irish/Catholic/Protestant] across 19 trials. In the latter tasks, the national or religious label presented was randomly assigned between participants. Higher scores indicated children selected a greater number of images typically associated with the category label. Finally, children rated how much conflict they perceived between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.
A mixed ANOVA (within-subjects: task, between-subjects: age and perceived conflict) revealed a difference in children’s performance by task (F(1, 618)= 3.12, p <.05), a main effect of age (F(1, 309)= 153.16, p <.001), and a nonsignificant, but statistical trend, for the main effect of perceived conflict on children’s responses (F(4, 309)= 2.28, p =.06). A series of one-sample t-tests, with Bonferroni corrections, revealed that children demonstrated first-person preferences for ingroup symbols by age 6, sorted symbols into religious and national categories by age 7, and identified third-person preferences based on group membership by age 8 (Figure 2).
In Northern Ireland, ingroup preferences for symbols associated with ethno-religious categories appear early, by age 6, and earlier than impartial categorization or knowledge about others’ preferences. Similar to gender and race categories (e.g., Shutts et al., 2013), children’s early ethno-religious categories appear to be initially applied in first-person reasoning. With age, children’s categories become conceptually richer and robust enough to apply to others’ preferences, perhaps due to experiencing ethno-religious symbols present at home, school, and/or intergroup boundaries. Initial evidence also suggests an influence of perceived intergroup conflict on children’s development of ethno-religious categories. Future research will investigate the influence of perceived conflict and outgroup attitudes on children’s social categorization, and how categorization relates to antecedents of peacebuilding, such as intergroup friendship preferences and prosocial behaviors.

Authors

• Jocelyn B Dautel, Queen's University, Belfast
  Presenting Author

• Laura K Taylor, Queen's University Belfast
  Non-Presenting Author

• Risa Rylander, Queen's University, Belfast
  Non-Presenting Author