Patterns of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes in Children and Adults: Tests in the Domain of Religion

After decades of psychological research on intergroup relations, the knowledge that social categories influence attitudes and beliefs comes as no surprise. Starting in infancy (Kelly et al., 2005; Quinn, Yahr, Kuhn, Slater, & Pascalis, 2002) and continuing into the elementary school years (Aboud, 1988; Baron & Banaji, 2006), group memberships such as race, gender, and age influence perceptions of others (Allport, 1954; Fiske & Taylor, 1991). As strong as the evidence is that social categories matter, it is equally well documented that that explicit endorsements of group stereotype and expressions of negative attitudes toward out-group members have diminished (Devine & Elliot, 1995; Madon et al., 2001). Some have taken this as a cause for optimism, arguing that individuals have become increasingly egalitarian (Arkes & Tetlock, 2004). Others argue that such changes, while genuine, are restricted to expressions of conscious cognition (Banaji, Nosek, & Greenwald, 2004). In fact, on implicit measures of social group attitudes and beliefs—those that use reaction times or other difficult-to-control responses to measure attitudes and beliefs—adults demonstrate robust intergroup preferences based on race, gender, age, and physical appearance (Nosek et al., 2007; Rudman & Goodwin, 2004). Such preferences predict voting behavior (Greenwald, Smith, Sriram, Bar-Anan, & Nosek, 2009), economic discrimination and physical harm against stigmatized group members (Rudman & Ashmore, 2007), and hiring decisions (Rooth, 2009). In fact, in socially sensitive domains such as race, implicit measures predict behaviors such as social distancing and non-verbal indicators of discomfort beyond the variance accounted for by self-reports (Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann, & Banaji, 2009). These differences in consciously expressed explicit attitudes and less consciously accessed implicit attitudes have produced a signature result in a wide variety of tests of social intergroup cognition: implicit and explicit attitudes are dissociated such that expressions on explicit measures favor the in-group or dominant group to a relatively small degree, whereas implicit attitudes demonstrate robust preferences (Nosek et al., 2007). This dissociation has been observed so often that indeed we might say that “the dissociated state” characterizes the intergroup attitude profile of our generation (Brauer, Wasel, & Niedenthal, 2000; Devine, 1989; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995; Fazio & Olson, 2003; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Hofmann, Gawronski, Gschwendner, Le, & Schmitt, 2005).1 How Does the Dissociated State of Attitudes Develop? Building on prior work conducted with adults, we investigated implicit and explicit attitudes among children. This approach allowed us to answer two important questions. First, to what extent do children's implicit and explicit attitudes resemble those of adults, particularly in a domain not marked by perceptual difference? Second, what factors might attenuate self-reported preferences in their earliest state? To answer these questions, we utilized children's propensity to report group-based attitudes even in the presence of societal norms censuring expressions of intergroup bias. Adults' lack of explicit preferences may partially derive from their desire to appear egalitarian; however, children younger than approximately 9 years of age typically do not show evidence of spontaneous socially desirable responding in intergroup domains. Younger children report preferring those who share their race (Baron & Banaji, 2006), language/accent (Kinzler, Shutts, Dejesus, & Spelke, 2009), and minimal group designation (Dunham, Baron, & Carey, 2011)—preferences that may be based on a number of factors, including group identity, social-conventional norms, and moral judgments (Rutland, Killen, & Abrams, 2010). Because these studies did not measure children's awareness of or desire to comply with social norms, it is not possible to say that young children never demonstrate susceptibility to social desirability. In fact, children as young as six may be aware of social desirability norms and respond in socially desirable ways under some circumstances (e.g., when accountable to teachers and classmates; FitzRoy & Rutland, 2010; Rutland, Cameron, Milne, & McGeorge, 2005). Additionally, even preschool-aged children conceal opinions that may be perceived as socially undesirable, such as negative evaluations of someone's drawing or a gift that one has received (Fu & Lee, 2007; Talwar, Murphy, & Lee, 2007). However, there is a lack of evidence demonstrating that children younger than 9 spontaneously respond in socially desirable ways in intergroup domains; in fact, in situations similar to the one created in the current experiments (e.g., no experimenter-imposed motivations to respond in an egalitarian fashion), children reported social preferences based on a variety of groups. Children's tendency to report their intergroup preferences regardless of societal norms allowed us to test a factor that may attenuate self-reported bias. Specifically, we examined whether children's preferences depend on the strength of group differences. Because adults' self-reported preferences tend to be quite low, it is difficult to determine what factors might reduce adults' conscious preferences. However, a developmental approach allows us to determine whether emphasizing similarity between groups might attenuate such preferences. We drew on the Common In-Group Identity Model (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000), which proposes that one way to reduce bias is to highlight group similarities. For example, heterosexual students may exhibit less prejudice against gay students at their university if they re-categorize them as in-group members (students at the same university) rather than out-group members. We tested whether a more subtle manipulation—simply highlighting similarities between groups rather than encouraging participants to re-categorize individuals—might also attenuate preferences. The Importance of Religious Differences Examining preferences in the domain of religion provides several advantages to testing children in domains that have been extensively studied in prior research. First, religion offers a number of out-groups that vary in the degree to which they differ from one's own. For Christians, the Judeo-Christian tradition provides a close cousin in Judaism, another monotheistic religion with shared origins (“weak religious difference”) compared to Hinduism, a polytheistic religion with strikingly different beliefs, rituals, and sacred texts (“strong religious difference”). Second, others' religious identities are not necessarily obvious. While some group memberships are perceptually salient (e.g., gender, race, age), in secular societies religious differences are more hidden. Because it can require more effort to determine who is a religious out-group member (e.g., one must rely on cues that may be less apparent than skin color or secondary sex characteristics), children have little direct knowledge of others' religious backgrounds. Some research shows that children do not routinely report group-based preferences unless members of the out-group are physically distinguishable and this perceptual dissimilarity is salient (Bigler, Jones, & Lobliner, 1997; Bigler, Spears Brown, & Markell, 2001). This finding highlights the importance of examining social preferences in a non-perceptual domain to determine whether even young children can form preferences when out-group members are not physically distinguishable. Third, religion is a particularly important, yet understudied, group membership. Most people in the world are theists (Lynn, Harvey, & Nyborg, 2009), and religious beliefs appear culturally universal (Atran, 2002; Boyer, 2001). Children as young as five categorize others on the basis of religious group membership (Diesendruck & haLevi, 2006), suggesting that even young children are sensitive to religious differences. Ten-year-old children apply religious concepts to explanations of morality (Nucci & Turiel, 1993), five-year-old children may be “intuitive theists” when reasoning about the origins of animate beings and inanimate objects (Kelemen, 2004), and starting at the age of six or earlier, children use religious teachings to help them understand the broader meaning of life (Coles, 1991). We asked if children would use religious identification as a basis for social preference. Overview of Current Studies In five experiments, we examined adults' (Study 1) and children's (Studies 2–5) preferences for members of groups demarcated by differences in religious beliefs and behaviors. The purpose of these studies was two-fold. We sought to examine the similarities and differences between children's and adults' implicit and explicit attitudes with a focus on the patterns of dissociation between the two. We also investigated the magnitude of religious differences to view whether the more automatic attitudes are visible even prior to the presence of explicit attitudes.