Santhanagopalan Radhika, Hok Hannah, Shaw Alex, Kinzler Katherine D
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Dev Sci. 2025 Mar;28(2):e13599. doi: 10.1111/desc.13599.
Immigration is among the most pressing issues of our time. Important questions concern the psychological mechanisms that contribute to attitudes about immigration. Whereas much is known about adults' immigration attitudes, the developmental antecedents of these attitudes are not well understood. Across three studies (N = 616), we examined US children's attitudes toward migrants by introducing them to two novel groups of people: one native to an island and the other migrants to the island. The migrants varied by (1) Migrant Status: migrants came from a resource-poor island (fleers) or a resource-rich island (pursuers); and (2) Acculturation Style: migrants assimilated to the native culture (assimilated) or retained their original cultural identity (separated). We studied a range of children's immigration attitudes: children's preferences, resource allocations, and perceptions of solidarity between groups (Experiment 1), children's conferral of voting power (Experiment 2a) and political representation (Experiment 2b), and children's beliefs about political representation when an equal government was not possible (Experiment 3). Overall, children showed a bias toward natives, but the degree of their bias depended on the type of migrant they were evaluating. Children generally favored Pursuers over Fleers, and Assimilated migrants over Separated migrants. In some cases, the intersection of these factors mattered: children expressed a specific preference for Separated Pursuers and a specific penalization of Separated Fleers. These studies reveal the early developmental roots of immigration attitudes, particularly as they relate to political power and the intersecting forces of migrant status and acculturation.
移民是我们这个时代最紧迫的问题之一。重要的问题涉及到影响移民态度的心理机制。虽然我们对成年人的移民态度了解很多，但这些态度的发展前身却不太清楚。在三项研究（N = 616）中，我们通过向美国儿童介绍两组新的人群来考察他们对移民的态度：一组是岛上的原住民，另一组是移民到该岛的人。移民的差异体现在：（1）移民身份：移民来自资源匮乏的岛屿（逃离者）或资源丰富的岛屿（追求者）；（2）文化适应方式：移民融入本土文化（同化）或保留其原有的文化身份（分离）。我们研究了一系列儿童的移民态度：儿童的偏好、资源分配以及对群体间团结的认知（实验1），儿童赋予投票权（实验2a）和政治代表权（实验2b），以及当平等政府无法实现时儿童对政治代表权的信念（实验3）。总体而言，儿童表现出对本土人的偏向，但这种偏向的程度取决于他们所评估的移民类型。儿童通常更青睐追求者而非逃离者，更青睐同化的移民而非分离的移民。在某些情况下，这些因素的交叉很重要：儿童对分离的追求者表现出特定的偏好，对分离的逃离者表现出特定的惩罚。这些研究揭示了移民态度的早期发展根源，特别是它们与政治权力以及移民身份和文化适应的交叉力量之间的关系。
