Children’s Ethno-National Flag Categories in Three Divided Societies

Abstract

Flags are conceptual representations that can prime nationalism and allegiance to one’s group. Investigating children’s understanding of conflict-related ethno-national flags in divided societies sheds light on the development of national categories. We explored the development of children’s awareness of, and preferences for, ethno-national flags in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and the Republic of North Macedonia. Children displayed early categorization of, and ingroup preferences for, ethno-national flags. By middle-childhood, children’s conflict-related social categories shaped systematic predictions about other’s group-based preferences for flags. Children of minority-status groups demonstrated more accurate flag categorization and were more likely to accurately infer others’ flag preferences. While most Balkan children preferred divided versus integrated ethno-national symbols, children in the Albanian majority group in Kosovo demonstrated preferences for the new supra-ethnic national flag. We discuss the implications of children’s ethno-national flag categories on developing conceptualizations of nationality and the potential for shared national symbols to promote peace.

Children’s outgroup giving in settings of intergroup conflict: The developmental role of ingroup symbol preference.

“…This suggests that the age effects on ingroup symbol preference, as a potential assessment of ingroup preference more generally, are distinct from outgroup giving or withholding resources from an outgroup as an assessment of prejudice (Brewer, 1999). Related research also has found that such symbol preferences may be more robust than mere familiarity based on exposure; children were also able to identify others’ symbol preferences, even when that other was an outgroup member (Dautel et al, 2020). Together, these findings suggest a link from preferences to behaviors among elementary school children in these postaccord settings.…”

“…Symbols objectify otherwise abstract political, social, and psychological constructions (Butz, 2009) and are used to denote social boundaries, especially those that are not easily visually distinguishable (e.g., ethno-religious groups; Brewer, 1999). Past research has found that children as young as 3 years old are aware of conflict-related groups and symbols (Connolly et al, 2002) and has demonstrated increasing preferences for ingroup symbols across middle childhood (Barrett, 2013; Barrett et al, 2003; Dautel et al, 2020; Shamoa-Nir et al, 2020). This understanding of ethno-religious groups, and the symbols related to such conflict-related groups (Taylor, Dautel, & Rylander, 2020), has been found to be related to children’s expression of prejudice (Bar-Tal & Teichman, 2005).…”

“…First, in early childhood, there is a shift from undifferentiated to ethnic awareness; in the latter phase, children are able to distinguish between socially determined cues representing group distinctiveness, such as group-specific symbols related to social, political, and psychological categories (Connolly et al, 2002; Taylor, Dautel, & Rylander, 2020). Around age 5, SIDT suggests ethnic awareness shifts to ethnic preference; that is, if given the choice, children tend to prefer ingroup, over outgroup, individuals and symbols (Dautel et al, 2020). Although acknowledging that children’s concept of ethnicity may be refined or elaborated on until age 10 or 11, SIDT suggests that around 6 or 7 years old, under certain conditions—such as exclusive group norms, threat, or scarcity—ethnic preference may shift to ethnic prejudice or attitudes and actions that have negative implications for outgroup members.…”

Intergroup resource allocation among children from minority and majority groups in three settings of former conflict

“…This suggests that minority and majority children may be aware of the differential threat presented to them by intergroup contact (transmitted in intergenerational narratives; Taylor et al, 2020); thus, majority children are content to engage in contact, while minority children intend to avoid such encounters. In NI, minority children between age 5 and 11 also showed lower preference for ingroup symbols than did majority children, despite being more accurate at identifying symbols overall (Dautel et al, 2020).…”

“…An important difference with those studies and the current work is that we did not draw attention to existing structural inequality; instead, we were interested in the possibility that children might spontaneously allocate to rectify inequality, based on their own knowledge. Thus, it may be that children require prompting to make broader cultural context (of which they hold impressive knowledge, e.g., Bar-Tal et al, 2017;Dautel et al, 2020) more salient within a given task. Future work may investigate differences from childhood into adolescence in spontaneous consideration of existing inequality, and its influence on intergroup allocation decisions, particularly given the emergence of political consciousness in adolescence, that is common in post-conflict settings (McKeown & Taylor, 2017;Reidy et al, 2015).…”