Canadian children’s concepts of national groups: A comparison with children from the United States.

Abstract

Understanding the development and structure of people’s concepts of national groups can contribute to an understanding of their behavior in the political arena, including perhaps the recent rise in nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Here, we provide a developmental investigation of concepts of national groups in a sample of 5- to 8-year-old Canadian children (N = 79). Using an extensive battery of measures, we assessed the extent to which children conceive of national groups as socially constructed versus as having deeper, perhaps biological, “essences” that shape their members’ physical and psychological makeup. At younger ages, Canadian children tended to essentialize national groups, including in a biological sense. At older ages, the biological conception of national groups subsided, but children continued to view these groups as meaningful and informative. A statistical comparison with 5- to 8-year-old American children’s responses to the same measures (N = 70; using data from Hussak & Cimpian, 2019) revealed a great degree of overlap, despite substantial differences between the two countries in how national identity is conceived and described. These findings add an important piece to our understanding of the development of concepts of national groups.

Political Ideology in Early Childhood: Making the Case for Studying Young Children in Political Psychology

“…For example, recent work has highlighted the importance of developmental work for understanding how racism manifests in today's society (Perry et al, 2021;Roberts & Rizzo, 2021), how economic inequalities are perpetuated (Elenbaas et al, 2020;Killen et al, 2016), and why gender gaps in political leadership are so slow to change (Bos et al, 2022;Heck et al, 2021aHeck et al, , 2021b. Research with young children has also begun to make contributions to traditional topics of inquiry in political psychology such as national identity and nationalism (e.g., Brown, 2011;Hussak & Cimpian, 2019;Santhanagopalan et al, 2021;Siddiqui et al, 2020), intergroup emotions (e.g., Ran et al, 2022), and dehumanization (for review, see McLoughlin & Over, 2018). In addition, studying young children has already proved informative for the study of attitudes toward politically charged social issues such as affirmative action (e.g., Sierksma & Shutts, 2020) and corruption and crime (e.g., Dunlea & Heiphetz, 2021;McAuliffe & Dunham, 2021;Reyes-Jaquez & Koenig, 2021).…”

“Go Faster!”: Adults’ Essentialist Representation of Gender and National Identity, but Not Race, Is Revealed by Cognitive Demand

“…Five-year-olds tend to believe that national identity is both biologically based and heritable, but these intuitions decrease by age 8 (Hussak & Cimpian, 2019;Siddiqui et al, 2020). Adult participants show less essentialist thinking about national identity compared to child participants (Davoodi et al, 2020), suggesting that adults are not essentialist about national identity.…”

“…Children readily perceive an essence as a source of both category membership and of category-specific features across social categories (Gelman, 2003). Children's openended responses to questions about sources for category membership (e.g., How does someone become Canadian?) reveal that they believe there is an internal source for national identity (Hussak & Cimpian, 2019;Siddiqui, Cimpian, & Rutherford, 2020). Additionally, children are likely to believe that there is an inherent source for category-specific features for both race (Hirschfeld, 1995) and gender (Taylor, Rhodes, & Gelman, 2009), and that this source is present at birth (Gelman, 2004).…”

“…Adults and 10-year-old children did not believe this (Taylor et al, 2009). Adults are more likely to believe that behaviors stereotypically associated with social categories are a result of environmental or situational factors (Chao, Hong, & Chiu, 2013;Hussak & Cimpian, 2019;Siddiqui et al, 2020;Taylor et al, 2009). This has led researchers to conclude that the switched-at-birth paradigm may be ill-suited for studying adult essentialism.…”

“…Researchers now choose methods like scales or primes over the switched-at-birth paradigm to assess adult essentialism. However, the switched-at-birth paradigm continues to be used in many recent essentialism studies (Gülgöz, DeMeules, Gelman, & Olson, 2019;Hussak & Cimpian, 2019;Siddiqui et al, 2020), so it would be useful to adapt the switched-at-birth paradigm for adults. Developmentally, the switched-at-birth paradigm provides some of the earliest evidence of children linking kinds with essences, starting from 4 years of age (Gelman, 2004).…”