Children’s Perceptions of Their Own and One Other Religious Group

This poster reports an investigation of children’s perceptions of their own and one other religious group. 242 5to 11-year-old children living in south-east England took part in the study. The children came from two religious groups, Muslim and Christian. The children were questioned in order to elicit their descriptions of members of the two religious groups, and to assess the perceived variability attributed to members of both groups. The subjective importance of the child’s own religious group membership was also measured. It was found that: religion became more important with age; the positivity of the children’s descriptions of the outgroup increased as a function of age; the ingroup was described in a more positive way than the outgroup at all ages; the variability attributed to both the ingroup and outgroup increased as a function of age; and the outgroup was seen as being more variable than the ingroup at all ages. The findings are discussed in relationship to predictions made by Social Identity Theory and Self-Categorisation Theory. INTRODUCTION Within any society, individuals belong to a large number of different social groups (e.g. gender groups, nationality groups, religious groups, etc.). Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1978, 1979, 1981) postulates that when a particular social group membership is salient and important to an individual, the within-group similarities and the between-group differences pertaining to that group are accentuated by that individual. This accentuation effect produces intra-group homogeneity effects, that is, an underestimation of the amount of variability which exists amongst the various people who make up a given social group. In addition, Social Identity Theory postulates that a fundamental human motivation is the need to have positive self-esteem. In constructing representations of ingroups and outgroups, dimensions of comparison are chosen which produce more favourable representations of ingroups and less favourable representations of outgroups, resulting in ingroup favouritism and outgroup denigration, thus producing positive self-esteem. Self-Categorisation Theory (Oakes, Haslam & Turner, 1994), which is a subsequent development of Social Identity Theory, further suggests that individuals have both personal and social identities, and whether the individual categorises the self at the personal or social group level is dependent upon the specific social context and the principle of meta-contrast (which ensures that categorisation within any given context occurs at the level which maximises between-group differences and within-group similarities). When the context __________________________________________________________________________ Poster presented at the XVIth Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development, Beijing, China, July 11-14 2000.