Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behaviour.
Department of Psychology.
Dev Psychol. 2020 Nov;56(11):2102-2109. doi: 10.1037/dev0001103. Epub 2020 Aug 27.
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 ( = 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 ( = 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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
了解人们对民族群体概念的发展和结构可以帮助我们理解他们在政治领域的行为，包括最近民族主义和反移民情绪的兴起。在这里，我们对加拿大 5 至 8 岁儿童样本（n=79）中的民族群体概念进行了发展性研究。我们使用了大量的测量工具，评估了儿童将民族群体视为社会建构的程度，以及他们将民族群体视为具有更深层次的、可能是生物学“本质”的程度，这些本质塑造了其成员的身体和心理特征。在较小的年龄，加拿大儿童倾向于将民族群体本质化，包括从生物学的角度来看。在较大的年龄，民族群体的生物学概念逐渐消失，但儿童仍然认为这些群体具有意义和信息。与对相同测量工具的 5 至 8 岁美国儿童的反应（n=70；使用 Hussak & Cimpian, 2019 的数据）进行的统计比较显示，尽管两国在民族认同的概念和描述方面存在很大差异，但存在很大程度的重叠。这些发现为我们理解民族群体概念的发展增添了重要的一环。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2020 APA，保留所有权利）。
