Children's Knowledge, Beliefs and Feelings about Nations and National Groups

Martyn Barrett

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135425890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book provides a state-of-the-art account of how people's subjective sense of national identity, and attitudes towards countries and national groups, develop through the course of childhood and adolescence. It offers a comprehensive review of the research which has been conducted into:

. children's understanding of nations as geographical territories and as political, historical and cultural communities

. children's knowledge, beliefs and feelings about the people who belong to different national groups

. children's attitudes towards, and emotional attachment to, their own country and national group.

The authors elaborate on the developmental patterns that have been found to emerge, contextualized by a consideration and evaluation of the theoretical frameworks which can be used to explain these patterns.

Written by the leading international authority in this field, and reporting (in collaboration with his colleagues) the findings from two major transnational research projects, this book will be invaluable to postgraduate students and researchers working in this field. The book will also be of great benefit to undergraduate students taking courses in Developmental Psychology, the Sociology of Childhood, and Education.

Chapter One
On children, nations and national groups

During the course of their development, virtually all children, irrespective of the specific country or culture in which they live, learn that the country in which they live is not the only country that exists. Instead, they find out that there are many other countries in the world, and they usually acquire some factual knowledge about their own country and at least some of these other countries. In addition, children usually acquire various beliefs about other countries and the people who live in them. They also often display distinctive patterns of national preferences, prejudices and feelings, with their own nation and national group usually occupying a privileged position in their feelings, evaluations and judgements. This book describes our current understanding of how this body of knowledge, beliefs and feelings about nations and national groups develops through the course of childhood and early adolescence.

Much of the research that will be discussed in this book has been conducted by developmental and social psychologists. However, we will also be drawing on work that has been conducted by sociologists, anthropologists, educationalists, geographers and political scientists wherever this is relevant to the issues under discussion. Researchers in all of these disciplines have been drawn to the study of children’s knowledge, beliefs and feelings about nations and national groups for a number of different reasons.

Developmental psychologists, for example, have investigated children’s knowledge about nations and national groups because this knowledge differs in important respects from many other types of knowledge that have more traditionally been examined within the field of developmental psychology. Traditionally, cognitive-developmentalists have studied children’s reasoning and thinking about the physical, psychological and biological worlds (e.g., Carey, 1985; P.L. Harris, 1989; Inagaki & Hatano, 2002; Perner, 1991; Siegal & Peterson, 1999; Spelke, 1991; Wellman & Gelman, 1998), children’s information-processing capabilities and capacities (e.g., Case, 1985; Kail, 1990; Klahr & MacWhinney, 1998; Schneider & Bjorklund, 1998), and children’s mastery of symbolic-representational systems such as language, drawing and mathematics (e.g., Bloom, 1998; P. Bryant & Bradley, 1985; Cox, 1992; Freeman, 1980; Gelman & Gallistel, 1978; Tomasello, 1992). By contrast, children’s understanding of societal institutions, systems and structures has been relatively neglected by developmental psychologists over the years (see Barrett & Buchanan-Barrow, 2005, and Hatano & Takahashi, 2005, for discussions of this issue). This neglect is unfortunate, because children’s thinking in societal domains differs in important respects from their thinking in non-societal domains.¹ For example, as far as their thinking about nations and national groups is concerned, such thinking is often accompanied by, or associated with, strong emotions. In other words, their thinking in this domain is often emotionally “hot”. Furthermore, these emotions sometimes appear to be present prior to the child’s acquisition of any factual knowledge or understanding. Hence, there is the possibility that children’s emotions serve a significant motivational role in their knowledge acquisition in this area. In other words, children’s knowledge, beliefs and feelings about nations and national groups provide developmental psychologists with an important opportunity to examine the relationship between cognitive and affective functioning in children and to investigate the development of emotionally “hot” cognition. As we shall see, the relationship between cognition and affect in this particular domain is complex and multifaceted.

In addition, some psychologists have been drawn to this field of research as a way of testing specific theories that have been proposed within their discipline. For example, several competing theories have been put forward to explain how preferences for, and prejudices against, social groups originate and develop through childhood (see, for example, Aboud, 1988; Aboud & Amato, 2001; Bandura, 1986, 1989; Bussey & Bandura, 1999; Nesdale, 1999, 2004; Ruble & Martin, 1998). To date, these theories have been tested primarily in relationship to children’s gender and ethnic preferences and prejudices. However, these theories can also be tested using data drawn from the study of children’s national preferences and prejudices. Similarly, a number of social-psychological theories have been put forward to explain the origins and contents of the stereotypes that people acquire as a consequence of belonging to, and identifying with, a particular social group. For example, two such theories are social identity theory (Tajfel, 1981; Tajfel & Turner, 1986) and self-categorization theory (Oakes, Haslam, & Turner, 1994; J.C. Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987). The predictions that are made by these theories can also be tested using data drawn from the study of children’s national identifications and children’s national stereotypes. As we shall see in the course of this book, the evidence that has been collected in this field is not always consistent with the predictions that are made by these various developmental and social-psychological theories.

However, there are also more practical reasons why social scientists in a number of different disciplines have been drawn to this field of enquiry. These practical reasons stem not so much from scientific curiosity but from the large-scale social changes that many countries are currently experiencing. The phenomenon of globalization means that many children who are growing up today (at least those who are growing up in more affluent societies) will live their future adult lives in a world that has shrunk dramatically. The advent of cheap and rapid international air travel, the invention of modern telecommunications and the Internet, the rise of globalized cultural industries, and the phenomenon of mass migration, have all created the potential for individuals to communicate and interact with people from other national groups on a scale that was unimaginable just 50 years ago. As a result, when they grow up, many of today’s children will be living and working in a new kind of multicultural and transnational environment. At the same time, however, and despite the dramatic process of globalization (or perhaps, in some cases, because of it), the world remains riven by inter-nation discord, prejudice and hostility. Achieving a scientific understanding of how the emotional attachment to one’s own nation develops, of how individuals come to view each other across national divides, and of how national prejudices and hostilities develop, is not only of scientific interest but also of considerable social importance.

Finally, in the case of some social scientists at least, their interests in this field stem from much more local, policy-related concerns. For example, in some countries such as the UK, Spain and Russia, greater political devolution and regional autonomy pose more specific challenges. These challenges concern the tension between maintaining national and state cohesion and loyalty while simultaneously accommodating demands for greater political and legislative powers at local and regional levels. At the same time, within the continent of Europe, the move towards a federal Europe is fiercely contested within many countries. Social policies, political and media campaigns, and even educational curricula within schools can all be used either to promote and facilitate further social change, or to prevent or inhibit further social change from taking place. However, for these policies, campaigns and curricula to be effective, they need to be grounded in appropriate evidence, particularly evidence about people’s attitudes and behaviour in relationship to those social group memberships to which they feel strongly attached (such as their national and regional group memberships). Social scientists are in a position to provide that evidence.

In the case of children, of course, one of the principal influences on their judgements, affiliations and attitudes can be the school curriculum. Schools clearly have numerous educational objectives. In affluent societies, it is arguable that an important objective should be to equip children with the knowledge and skills that will enable them to operate effectively within the globalized world in which they now live. It is also arguable that a further goal should be to instil tolerance, concern, care and compassion for other people, and to minimize prejudice and hostility towards other people who belong to other national or ethnic groups. However, for educational programmes with these sorts of goals to be effective, we need to understand the relevant cognitive and affective developmental processes, so that the contents of these educational programmes can be optimally tailored to engage with children’s emerging cognitive and affective competencies. In this way, the school curriculum could be used much more effectively to channel individual-acquisitional factors and processes towards socially desirable developmental outcomes. Hence the interest of some developmental psychologists and educationalists in this particular field of enquiry.

Some Initial Conceptual Distinctions

Before we embark on our survey of the research that has been conducted in this field, it will be helpful to delineate the meanings of some of the terms we will be using throughout this book. In the English language, there are a number of different terms that can be used to refer to nations, and in informal conversations about nations, these terms are often used inconsistently. Three common terms which are frequently confused are “nation”, “state” and “country”. These terms are sometimes used by English speakers interchangeably to refer either to a community of people who are bound by a common history and shared culture, to a political entity that is ruled by a single government, or to a particular geographical territory delimited by internationally recognized borders.² Given this conceptual array and potential for conceptual confusion, it will be helpful to anchor our terminology at the outset.

The term “nation” will be used in this book to refer to a named human community occupying a homeland and having a shared history, common myths of ancestry, a common mass public culture, and shared values, symbols, traditions, customs and practices. This definition is adapted from the work of A.D. Smith (1991, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2004), who emphasizes the origins of nations in ethnic communities, and the cultural-symbolic elements through which nations are represented, reproduced and interpreted by their members.³ Smith stresses that this definition is intended to highlight the distinctive and characteristic features of nations, rather than their common denominators or necessary features. Notice that the emphasis of Smith’s definition is on a community of people who are bound together by their sense of a common history and by a common culture. In this sense, nations are not unlike ethnic communities. Both nations and ethnic communities have collective names, myths of ancestry, historical memories, and shared traditions, customs and practices. However, Smith argues that nations are different from ethnic communities, in that nations occupy and live in their historic home-land, whereas ethnic communities are often only linked symbolically and affectively to a homeland. He also argues that ethnic communities, unlike nations, do not normally have a mass public culture, nor do they usually have a standardized and codified national history. We may add to Smith’s list of differentiating characteristics the need for a nation (but not an ethnic community) to exhibit self-awareness as a nation (cf. W. Connor, 1994) and to have been politicized, particularly in its assertion of, or demands for the recognition of, its status as a nation (cf. Brass, 1991).

By contrast, the term “state” will be used in this book to refer to a sovereign political entity in which a government uses a set of institutions to exercise an administrative monopoly over a territory that has clearly demarcated borders, where the rule of that government is sanctioned by law, and where that government has the capacity to use coercion and violence in order to enforce its policies within that territory. This definition is adapted from the work of Giddens (1985), who views modern states as bordered power-containers. He emphasizes the fact that modern states are always defined by precisely specified borders, and that they lay claim to sovereign jurisdiction over all of the people, groups, organizations and institutions located within their borders. They also claim ultimate control over all matters that take place within their territory, including the maintenance of public order and the regulation of economic activity, and the threat of violence is used to back up these claims. Giddens argues that control is exercised through three characteristic features of the modern state: surveillance, which occurs through the collection and storage of information that is used to coordinate, administer and control the activities of people, groups, organizations and institutions within the state; bureaucratization, whereby specialized administrative officials are appointed who are specifically dedicated to the functioning of the state and to its apparatus of surveillance and control; and the development of police and military power, which is used to back up the demands of the state with the threat of violence. A further important feature of modern states, according to Giddens, is that they claim sovereignty; that is, each state asserts that it is the pre-eminent political authority within its own territory and has a right to self-governance, demands that this right be recognized by other states, and reserves the right to defend its territorial borders militarily against all external forces and threats from other states. Because the borders of states are demarcations of sovereignty, they have to be agreed by all of the states whose borders they are, and as such, states are necessarily embedded within a system of international relations.

According to these definitions of “nation” and “state”, it follows that nations are not equivalent to states. For this reason, there are many stateless nations in the world (Guibernau, 1999; Keating, 2002; MacInnes & McCrone, 2001). The Palestinian and Kurdish people are two such nations. In each case, a group of people who are united by a common history, a common culture and a sense of their own common identity as a nation do not have their own state in which to live. Instead, Palestinian people are dispersed across the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, while Kurdish people are dispersed across Iran, Iraq and Turkey. Neither of these two nations has its own state through which it can establish its own sovereign structure of governing institutions. Other stateless nations include Quebec (which lies within Canada), Catalonia (which lies within Spain and France, and is split in two by the border between these two states), the Basque Country (which lies within Spain), and both Scotland and Wales (both of which lie within the UK). Where a degree of political autonomy has been devolved to some of these stateless nations by the states in which they are located, such devolution of powers is nevertheless subject to the pre-eminent control of the superordinate state, and can be legally suspended or rescinded by that state. A further feature of stateless nations is that they are excluded from direct representation in international organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union, and they are therefore denied access to many of the resources and forms of power in the international arena to which states have access (Guibernau, 1999).

A corollary to the fact that there are many stateless nations is that there are many multination states in the world, that is, states that contain more than just a single nation within their territorial borders. Canada, Spain and the UK are three clear examples. Although English speakers sometimes use the term “nation-state” as yet another synonym for “country” or “state”, there are in fact very few true nation-states in the world, that is, states in which the borders of the state enclose just a single nation. W. Connor (1994; see also Tilly, 1990) estimates that only 10% of states are properly described as nation-states, the other 90% being multination states instead. Germany and Japan are two examples of nation-states, but Connor argues that it is erroneous to construe these two countries as the norm and to generalize from them to other states, as they are very much the exception.

A further feature of multination states is that they are often politically and culturally dominated by one of their constituent nations. This can convey the impression to outsiders (and indeed to many insiders) that they are a nation-state. For example, for several centuries, the UK has been dominated politically and economically by England. As a result, England, rather than either Scotland or Wales, has provided many of the most salient institutions, symbols, traditions, historical events and historical figures that are associated with the British state (Kumar, 2003). Analogously, the Spanish state has been dominated historically by the nation of Castile, rather than by either Catalonia or the Basque Country (Carr, 2001), with the Castilian nation furnishing many of the symbols and traditions that are associated with Spain (including both the capital city and the state language). It has also been argued that the USA is best viewed not as a nation-state but as a multination state that is politically and culturally dominated by its ethnically white, English-speaking, Christian nation, because the USA in fact incorporates several other nations such as the Navajo nation (Puri, 2004).

Although myths of origins, codified histories and shared values, symbols and traditions are most frequently discussed in connection with nations rather than states, it is important to note that states, including multination states, also usually have their own codified histories, their own myths of origin, and their own systems of shared values, symbols and traditions. Thus, not only nations but also states can be viewed as having distinctive cultures and histories with which individuals who live within those states may subjectively identify. The terms “civic identity” and “civic nationalism” are sometimes used to denote identity with and loyalty to the state rather than the nation (e.g., Ignatieff, 1993; Parekh, 2000), although W. Connor (1994, 2004) has argued that the term “patriotism” should be used here instead for the sake of conceptual clarity (in order to retain the term “nationalism” to denote identity with and loyalty to the nation, not the state).

The third term that we will be using throughout this book, in addition to “nation” and “state”, is “country”. This third term will be used in one of two ways. First, it will sometimes be employed relatively informally as a more generic term than either “nation” or “state”. This is because it is sometimes appropriate to call both nations and states “countries”, depending on the context (e.g., in the case of the UK, it is appropriate to call not only Britain but also Scotland a “country”). Second, “country” will also be used in this book when the emphasis is on physical-geographical territories and homelands rather than on historical-cultural communities or on political entities and institutions. A final pair of terms that will be used in this book are “national group” and “state group”. These terms will be used to refer to the people who belong to a particular nation and to a particular state, respectively. This is because it is useful to differentiate between the collective entities denoted by the terms “nation” and “state” and the people who belong to those collective entities.

While it is helpful to make these various conceptual distinctions for analytic purposes, it ought to be noted that many adults (and indeed children) often do not draw such clear-cut conceptual distinctions themselves during the course of their everyday lives. In nation-states, because the nation and the state are coterminous, the conceptual distinction between nation and state is often blurred for those who live within these countries. Similarly, in multination states that are politically and culturally dominated by one of their constituent nations, because that dominant nation is typically the primary source of the codified state history and the symbols and traditions of the state, the members of that dominant nation also often confuse nation and state (because their own nation is so largely synonymous with the state). For example, this commonly occurs in Britain, Spain and the USA, where members of the dominant national groups frequently view the state as being synonymous with their own nation, rather than as a superordinate political construction. Research conducted in England, for instance, has revealed that many adults construe the terms “British” and “English” in a number of different ways. Sometimes these terms are construed as legal, state citizenship or nationality descriptors, sometimes they are construed as racial or ancestral descriptors, and sometimes they are construed as cultural or lifestyle descriptors (Condor, 1996; Jacobson, 1997). Furthermore, these different interpretations (some of which involve construing “British” as a national category rather than as a state category, and “English” as a state category rather than as a national category) can vary in their salience to different individuals depending on the particular ethnic, national and racialized group to which they themselves belong (Parekh, 2000). However, for the members of dominated nations within the same state (such as Scotland in the UK and Catalonia in Spain), such confusions between nation and state tend not to occur, with these individuals usually drawing a very clear distinction between their nation and their state (Guibernau, 2004b; McCrone, 2001). It is essential to keep these sorts of complexities and possible conceptual blurrings by individuals in mind when we consider the psychology of adults and children in relationship to states and nations.

Theoret...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• About the author
• Preface
• 1. On children, nations and national groups
• 2. Children’s knowledge, beliefs and feelings about countries construed as geographical territories
• 3. Children’s knowledge, beliefs and feelings about the state construed as a political entity
• 4. Children’s knowledge, beliefs and feelings about nations and states construed as historical and cultural communities
• 5. Children’s knowledge, beliefs and feelings about the people who belong to different national and state groups
• 6. The development of children’s subjective identifications with their own nation and state
• 7. Theoretical accounts of how children’s knowledge, beliefs and feelings about nations and states develop
• References
• Author index
• Subject index