An Exploration of the Differential Effects of Parents' Authoritarianism Dimensions on Pre-school Children's Epistemic, Existential, and Relational Needs

Abstract

Research on adult populations has widely investigated the deep differences that characterize individuals who embrace either conservative or liberal views of the world. More recently, research has started to investigate these differences at very early stages of life. One major goal is to explore how parental political ideology may influence children's characteristics that are known to be associated to different ideological positions. In the present work, we further investigate the relations between parents' ideology and children cognitive processing strategies within the framework of political ideology as motivated social cognition (Jost et al., 2003) and the dual process model of political ideology (Duckitt et al., 2002). Specifically, epistemic (implicit attitudes toward order vs. chaos), existential (negativity and threat bias), and relational needs (conformity measure) were assessed in pre-school children (N = 106; 4–6 years). For each child at least one parent completed both the Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and the Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) measures. Interestingly, results indicated that mothers' and fathers' responses had unique associations with children's socio-cognitive motivations, and different findings emerged in relation to the two facets of parental authoritarianism, namely dominance (i.e., SDO) and submission (i.e., RWA). More specifically, children's existential needs appeared to be more related to mothers' RWA scores, whereas children's epistemic needs appeared to be more related to fathers' SDO. Finally, parents' RWA and SDO scores appeared to have opposite effects on children's relational needs: children's conformity increased at increasing levels of mothers' RWA and decreased at increasing levels of fathers' SDO. Overall, however, results were relatively weak and several links between the responses of parents and their children were not significant, suggesting caution in drawing strong conclusions about the impact of parents' ideology. Limitations and future developments will be discussed.

The origins of information processing preferences in politics: Examining parental influence

“…Retrospective reports may be too unreliable or our college-age student sample too old to capture the most formative periods of parental influence. Studies including children as young as 3 to 8 years old detected significant associations between parental ideological orientations and children's cognitive preferences for order, conformity, and security, as well as trust and information processing patterns linked to authoritarianism (Guidetti, Carraro, & Castelli, 2017;Hussak & Cimpian, 2018). Parents and children may share other cognitive preferences, such as epistemic and relational needs, or personality traits not examined in this study that predict similarities in political and information processing preferences.…”

RWAc and SDOc: The measurement of right‐wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation in childhood

“…This might simply be a function of the messiness of giving tasks to children who are prone to distraction, leading to error variance and non-significant correlations. Indeed, in the introduction we noted a similar messiness in the findings of parent-child correlations for RWA and SDO in Guidetti et al (2017).…”

Brief Exposure to Infants Activates Social and Intergroup Vigilance

“…Participants also completed the Competitive Jungle Beliefs Questionnaire (α = 0.86) [16] (see Supplementary Materials for results on this measure). This was followed by the Italian version of the short 12-item version of the RWA scale (α = 0.63) [36,37]. Finally, as in Study 1, participants completed the Parental Bonding Instrument (α = 0.92) and Attachment Style Questionnaire (α = 0.77) before the general demographic questions (please see Supplementary Materials for findings of the Parental Bonding Instrument and the Attachment Styles Questionnaire).…”