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PAPER

The intergenerational transmission of ethnic essentialism: howparents talk counts the most

Gili Segall, Dana Birnbaum, Inas Deeb and Gil Diesendruck

Department of Psychology and Gonda Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Abstract

The present study analyzed the role of parents as potential sources of children’s essentialist beliefs about ethnicity. We tested 76parent–child (5-year-olds) dyads of Jewish Israeli parents from three social groups, defined by the kindergartens childrenattended: national religious, secular, or Jewish-Arab integrated. We assessed parents’ and children’s beliefs, and parents’ usageof ethnic attitudinal and categorization markers in a book-reading activity. Overall, national religious parents manifested thestrongest ethnic essentialism and endorsement of anti-negotiations with Palestinians, and were the most likely to expressnegative attitudes and mark ethnic categories in their conversations with their children. Moreover, regression analyses revealedthat ethnic categorization in parents’ speech was the most reliable predictor of children’s ethnic essentialism. Ethnic essentialismis transmitted to children not via explicit communication of intergroup beliefs or attitudes, but rather via the sheer marking ofcategories in ways that resonate with children’s own intuitive ways of conceptualizing the social world.

Research highlights

• A belief that underlies intergroup prejudice andbiases is that members of different social groups areessentially different kinds of people. We show thatchildren’s development of this belief is related not totheir parents’ holding and explicitly teaching it, butsimply to parents’ marking of relevant social catego-ries.

• From a theoretical perspective, the finding revealsthat social essentialism needs minimal cultural trig-gers in order to blossom in children.

• From a practical perspective, the finding spotlightsparents’ marking of social categories as a target foreducational intervention aimed at curbing the poten-tially pernicious implications of social essentialism.

Introduction

Children all over the world essentialize a variety of socialcategories. They believe that social category membershipis stable and inherited (Hirschfeld, 1996; Kinzler &Dautel, 2012; Taylor, 1996), that category members share

non-obvious psychological and physical properties (Birn-baum, Deeb, Segall, Ben-Eliyahu & Diesendruck, 2010;Shutts, Pemberton Roben & Spelke, 2012), and thatcategories capture objective kinds (Diesendruck, Goldf-ein-Elbaz, Rhodes, Gelman & Neumark, 2013). Worry-ingly, both adults’ (Prentice & Miller, 2007) andchildren’s (Levy & Dweck, 1999; Pauker, Ambady &Apfelbaum, 2010) essentialism is associated with stereo-typing, negative attitudes, or prejudice toward socialcategories. In part driven by these pernicious implica-tions, researchers have become interested in the originsof social essentialism (e.g. Haslam, Rothschild & Ernst,2002; Keller, 2005).

One observation informing this research program isthat although social essentialism is found in a variety ofcultures, the particular categories essentialized differ.Thus, children in the US essentialize gender and even-tually race (Rhodes & Gelman, 2009), in Israel ethnicity(Jews/Arabs; Diesendruck & haLevi, 2006), in Chilesocial status (del Rio & Strasser, 2011), and in Indiaadults essentialize caste (Mahalingam, 2003). In fact,even within cultures, the degree to which childrenessentialize salient social categories varies acrosssub-groups (Deeb, Segall, Birnbaum, Ben-Eliyahu &

Address for correspondence: Gil Diesendruck, Department of Psychology, Bar-IlanUniversity, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel; e-mail: [email protected]

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Developmental Science (2014), pp 1–13 DOI: 10.1111/desc.12235

Diesendruck, 2011; Rhodes & Gelman, 2009). Thesevariations intimate that cultural factors may play animportant role in the development of social essentialism.One type of cultural factor that may have such a role is

parents’ own beliefs or attitudes towards the pertinentsocial groups. For instance, Italian parents’ (primarilymothers’) implicit racial attitudes contributed to chil-dren’s racial attitudes (Castelli, Zogmaister & Tomelleri,2009), and specifically about essentialism, studies inIsrael found that certain religious beliefs correlated withchildren’s social essentialism (Diesendruck & Haber,2009). Crucially, however, if parents’ essentialist beliefsor attitudes are to impact children’s essentialist beliefs,they need to be manifested in a way that children candetect. In other words, ‘proximal’ sources of culturalvariation need to mediate between the above ‘distal’sources and children’s essentialism. Examples of suchproximal sources are parents’ selection of ethnicallyheterogeneous or homogenous social environments andpartners, their exposure of children to cultural diversity,and their articulation of ideologies – some of whichindeed have been shown to affect children’s attitudes orbeliefs regarding social categories (e.g. Pahlke, Bigler &Suizzo, 2012; Rhodes & Gelman, 2009).The general goal of the present study was to assess the

real-world potential factors by which parents – asprimary cultural agents for young children – might defacto transmit essentialist beliefs about ethnicity to theiryoung children. Three sub-goals were defined. First, wewere interested in uncovering the potential contributionof distal parental sources of cultural variation tochildren’s essentialism about ethnicity. Second, weinvestigated the impact of parents’ language input, bothindependently and as a proximal mediator of distalsources, to children’s ethnic essentialism. Third andfinally, we assessed which types of linguistic indices mostsubstantially contributed to children’s essentialism.Laboratory studies have identified two linguistic forms

as particularly powerful promoters of essentialism:count-noun labels (e.g. made-up ones, such as, ‘she is acarrot-eater’, Gelman & Heyman, 1999; or conventionalones, such as, ‘he is a Jew, she is an Arab’, Birnbaumet al., 2010), and generics – which are statements madeabout categories in general that imply the presence ofinherent causal properties (e.g. ‘boys are good at math’;Cimpian & Markman, 2011). Here, rather than assessingwhether experimentally manipulating the language usedto describe novel social categories influenced children’sessentialization of these categories (e.g. Rhodes, Leslie &Tworek, 2012), we investigated whether the languagespontaneously used by parents to describe conventionalsocial categories in a naturalistic setting had a similaressentializing effect. Further, whereas Gelman, Taylor

and Nguyen (2004) investigated the relations betweenparents’ and children’s talk about a social category, andthe relation between children’s talk and beliefs, here weinvestigated the relations between parents’ talk andchildren’s beliefs.In order to uncover the types of linguistic indices that

might contribute to children’s beliefs, we focused on thesame two types used by Gelman et al. (2004). One typeconsisted of explicit content-full expressions of attitudestowards ethnicities, and beliefs regarding ethnic differ-ences. These included parents’ endorsement of ethnicstereotypes, provision of negatively valenced commentsabout Arabs, and emphasis on differences versus simi-larities between Jews and Arabs – this latter sort ofexpression constituting an explicit endorsement ofessential differences between ethnicities. The second typeconsisted of forms emphasizing categories per se, namelycount-noun labels and generics, i.e. the forms that havereceived experimental support for their capacity topromote essentialism. Note that these forms are moreimplicit in their endorsement of essentialism, insofar asthey do not articulate essentialist notions, such asthe stability, heritability, or homogeneity of ethniccategories.In the present study, we sampled parents and 5-year-

olds from sub-cultural groups for which there is evidenceof differences in essentialist thinking, and assessedvarious parental factors that could serve as sources ofthat variation. Specifically, we sampled parent–childdyads from three Jewish groups in Israel: dyads whereinchildren attended Jewish-only religious kindergartens,dyads wherein children attended Jewish-only secularkindergartens, and dyads wherein children attendedJewish-Arab integrated kindergartens. Previous studieshave shown that although by 5 years of age, childrenfrom these three groups show evidence of essentialistthinking about ethnicity (‘Jews’ and ‘Arabs’), it was onlyby 7–8 years of age that systematic differences betweengroups were found in the degrees of such essentialism –with religious children manifesting the most, childrenattending integrated schools the least, and secularchildren falling in the middle (see Birnbaum et al.,2010; Deeb et al., 2011). Given our interest in capturingpreceding sources of essentialism, we focused on theyoungest age at which such beliefs have been docu-mented in the target populations, i.e. 5-year-olds. Giventhe previous findings, however, we did not expect to findsubstantial differences across groups at this age. Notethat although we refer to the difference between Jews andArabs in terms of ethnicity, in Israeli society ‘Jews’ aretypically considered all those identified as Jewish-by-religion irrespective of their ethnic origins (e.g. Ethi-opians-Jews, North-African Jews, Jews from Arab


2 Gili Segall et al.

countries), and ‘Arabs’ are considered all non-Jews whooriginate from Arab countries, irrespective of theirreligious faith (e.g. Muslim, Christian).

The study focused on three general parental sourcesthat could contribute to children’s degree of ethnicessentialism. The first two were of the ‘distal’ typedefined above. The first was parents’ own degree ofethnic essentialism. Put simply, do highly essentialistparents have highly essentialist children? The second wasuniquely and potentially highly relevant for the socialcategory and context assessed here; namely, parents’political orientation toward the Israeli–Palestinian con-flict. In particular, a higher percentage of ‘nationalreligious adults’ – which composed our religious sample– endorse the notion that Jews are entitled to the land ofIsrael, and thus oppose a two-state solution withterritorial compromises. In turn, secular Jewish Israelis– especially those who send their children to integratedschools – are willing to negotiate towards a compromise,or form one state including both Jews and Arabs. Thus,the hypothesis here was that the less in favor of territorialcompromises parents were, the more they would endorseethnic essentialism, and thus the more ethnic essentialisttheir children might be.

The third general source assessed here consisted of theproximal source; namely, parents’ linguistic inputregarding ethnicity. To this end, we created a bookdepicting Jews and Arabs in various contexts, videotapedparents talking to their children while viewing the book,and later analyzed their discourse (see Gelman et al.,2004, for a similar book on gender). Discourse analysesallowed us to assess differences among parents ofdifferent sub-cultural groups in how they talk aboutethnicity to their children, whether these differencesaccount for children’s essentialist thinking, and whetherchildren’s essentialism is most affected by how parentstalk or what parents say.

Method

Participants

Participants were 76 Jewish Israeli parent–child dyadsfrom three different social groups: children attendingJewish-only secular kindergartens (N = 31, 14 girls, Mage

= 5.7 years, SD = 0.4), children attending Jewish-onlyreligious kindergartens (N = 29, 16 girls, Mage =5.6 years, SD = 0.4), and children attending Jewish-Arabintegrated kindergartens (N = 16, 9 girls, Mage =5.6 years, SD = 0.5). For the sake of convenience, werefer to both children and parents from each group assecular, religious, and integrated. Eighty-seven percent of

the parents were mothers, similarly distributed across thesocial groups. Participants volunteered to participateafter seeing announcements about the study in thechildren’s kindergartens. Signed parental permission wasobtained for all participants.

Procedure

The experimenters met each dyad twice at the familyhome. In the first meeting, the experimenters handed theparent the experimental book, and asked them to read ittogether with their child, talking about the differentkinds of people in the book. Parents were told in advancethat the interaction would be videotaped. After the booktask, one of the experimenters presented the Stabilitytask to the child (see details below). During that time, theparent completed the essentialism tasks and politicalorientation questionnaire. In the second meeting – a fewdays after the first – one experimenter met with the childand completed the remaining essentialism tasks (ECQand Adoption, see details below). The book task wasalways presented first in order to minimize the potentialinfluence of the essentialism tasks on parents’ sponta-neous discourse. The questionnaires and tasks werepresented in random order for each participant. As thiswas part of a larger project, participants in factcompleted a larger battery of tasks. Here we report onlythose pertinent to the present purpose.

Tasks

Language measures – the book

The book, entitled ‘What different people do’, wascreated in our laboratory based on the one used byGelman et al. (2004) in their study on gender. Each pagedepicted Arab or Jewish characters, and included min-imal text consisting of the characters’ names andactivities (see Figure 1 for examples). Ethnicity wasindicated by visual cues in the characters themselves (e.g.a yarmulke for Jews, and a head-shawl for Arabs), in thebackground (e.g. Hebrew- or Arabic-language newspa-per next to the characters), and the proper names of thecharacters (e.g. Lior or Ali).

Half of the pages in the book depicted contexts thatwere identified in a pre-test as stereotypical of theethnicity of the character, and the other half depictedcounter-stereotypical contexts. For the pre-test, 10 Jew-ish and 10 Arab adults were asked to generate as manyassociations as they could regarding an Arab boy/girl/woman/man, and a Jewish boy/girl/woman/man. Out ofthe total 211 associations produced, we chose to assessthe typicality of 72 different activities and professions


Transmission of essentialism 3

that could be represented in a picture and were notnegatively valued. Twenty Jewish and 21 Arab under-graduates were asked to rank these 72 activities on ascale of 1 (‘typical of Jews and not typical of Arabs’) to 5(‘typical of Arabs and not typical of Jews’). The eightmost exclusively typical activities of each ethnicity wereselected for inclusion in the book (see Table 1).Four versions of the book were created, such that

‘Arab’ pages in one book were ‘Jewish’ pages in the

other book (and vice versa), stereotypical activities werepaired with one ethnicity in one book, but with theother in the other book, and the order of the pagesvaried. All four versions were identical in the distribu-tion of page types, such that each book was composedof four Arab-stereotypical pages, four Jewish-stereotyp-ical, four Arab-counter-stereotypical, and four Jewish-counter-stereotypical. In the example in Figure 1, onebook included Lior and the Abidats, and the other Aliand the Levis. Importantly, given that the goal of thebook task was to elicit parents’ voluntary discourseabout ethnicity, ethnic labels were absent from thebook, and at no point were parents explicitly instructedto talk about ethnicity.Conversations were transcribed based on the proce-

dures described by Gelman et al. (2004). Each videosession was transcribed verbatim by one coder andchecked by an additional coder, with disagreementsresolved by a third coder. The unit of analysis fortranscribing and coding was the utterance, defined as acontinuous unit of conversation. Continuity was definedas sequential talk without any stops or interruptions bythe other speaker. An utterance could have been asentence, a few words, or even a single word, and whatindicated the end of it was usually a rising or fallingintonation, or a change of speaker. When intonation andpausing conflicted with one another, intonation wasused. A total of 17,685 utterances were identified, withapproximately 74% of them being on-task. There wereno significant differences among social groups on theaverage number of utterances produced or the percentageof on-task utterances.The 13,085 on-task utterances were coded by two

research assistants working independently and blind toparticipants’ group membership. Codes included linguis-tic indices that either expressed content-full messagesabout ethnicity – (a) valence, (b) stereotypes, and (c)contrasts – or formal markers of ethnic categories – (d)labeling and (e) generics. For all five indices, we

Jewish Arab

(a) Jewish stereotypic, Arab counter-stereotypic

‘Who is a pilot?’ ‘Who is a pilot?’

‘Here, this is Lior.’ ‘Here, this is Ali.’

(b) Jewish counter-stereotypic, Arab stereotypic

‘Who lives near their uncles andgrandparents?’

‘Who lives near their uncles andgrandparents?’

‘Here, this is the Levi family.’ ‘Here, this is the Abidat family.’

Figure 1 Sample pages from the book used in the study.

Table 1 Complete set of activities depicted in the experimental book

Arab stereotypic Mean typicality score (1–5) Jewish stereotypic Mean typicality score (1–5)

carry a jug on the head 4.7 a woman working in a hi-tech company 1.42one man married toseveral women

4.63 pilot 1.49

a shepherd 4.61 policewoman 1.54riding a donkey 4.56 children with oxidized hair 1.68construction worker 4.15 a family with two children and a dog 1.71Beygale (Israeli Pretzel) seller 4.12 security guard 1.76living near your close relatives 4.12 a man and a woman sitting in a coffee-shop smoking 1.76carpets merchant 4.00 a smoking woman 1.92

Note: The scale went from 1 (‘typical of Jews and not typical of Arabs’) to 5 (‘typical of Arabs and not typical of Jews’).



calculated both ‘absolute’ measures reflecting the fre-quency of critical aspects of each index, and ‘bias’measures reflecting critical biases manifested in eachindex. Inter-coder agreement was assessed on 10% of thetranscripts, and it was above 75% for all codes, withdiscrepancies resolved by a third coder. All indices werecalculated in terms of their frequency out of 100 on-taskutterances.

(a) Valence was coded when a speaker made either anexplicit positive (e.g. ‘what a nice family’) or negative(e.g. ‘Yuck!’) comment about a character or activity.Given our interest in attitudes towards the out-group,the measures of valence were calculated only in regard toArab pages (there were in fact very few valencedcomments made on Jewish pages). The ‘positive valencescore’ was the number of positive comments made inregard to Arab pages; the ‘negative valence score’ wasthe number of negative comments; the ‘total valencescore’ was the sum of the previous two; and the ‘valencebias score’ was the number of positive minus negativecomments. (b) Stereotypes: Two types of stances towardthe stereotype depicted on the pages were coded:affirmation (e.g. ‘an Arab can’t work as a securityguard’), and negation (e.g. ‘a Jewish woman can alsohold a jug on her head’). We calculated the number ofboth affirmation and negation statements made inregard to both Arabs and Jews. The ‘stereotype biasscore’ was the number of total stereotype affirmationsminus negations. (c) Contrasts: We calculated the numberof utterances including a statement of differencesbetween the two ethnicities (e.g. ‘We marry only withone woman, but Arabs can marry more than one’), andthose including a statement of similarity (e.g. ‘Jews alsowork as builders, not just Arabs’). The ‘contrast biasscore’ was the number of utterances stating differencesminus those stating similarities. (d) Labeling: In Hebrew,it is often the case that the morphology of count-nounsand adjectives is identical. For that reason, we countedas instances of labeling all cases in which the parentexplicitly mentioned an ethnic label (e.g. ‘he is [a Jew/Jewish]’, ‘this woman is [an Arab/Arabic]’). Absolutescores were calculated for the number of times Arabswere labeled, the number of times Jews were labeled, andthe sum of both. The ‘labels bias score’ was the numberof Arab minus Jews labels. (e) Generics were coded whenthe parent used generic language either by using labels asbare plurals (e.g. ‘Arabs don’t do this’), indefinitesingulars (e.g. ‘Jew is smart’), or using generalizations(e.g. ‘shepherds feed goats’). We calculated the numberof times generics were used in regard to Arabs, in regardto Jews, and the sum of both. The ‘generics bias score’was the number of generics used in regard to Arabsminus to Jews.

Essentialism measures

Children were read and instructed on all tasks. Parentscompleted shorter, paper-and-pencil versions of thetasks. Other than these procedural differences, the tasksfor the two age groups were identical.

(a) ECQ: The Essentialism Components Question-naire has been used with children from ages 5 to 12, andhas been shown to reliably distinguish between childrenfrom different socio-cultural backgrounds, and amongdifferent categories (Deeb et al., 2011; Diesendruck &Haber, 2009). The ECQ assessed beliefs regarding threeessentialist components: (1) psychological distinctive-ness (four questions: ‘To what extent do Arabs and Jewsdiffer in the way they think? What they like? In the waythey behave? In the way they look?’), (2) physicaldistinctiveness (four questions: ‘To what extent doArabs and Jews differ in what they have inside theirbody? Kind of blood they have?’, and, ‘Is it possible fora Jew/Arab to do some things and then become anArab/Jew?’), and (3) heritability of category member-ship (four questions: ‘Is it possible that a Jewish/Arabmother will give birth to an Arab/Jewish baby?’, and, ‘Ifa child is born and raised within a Jewish/Arabic familywhen he was a baby, is it possible that he will become anArab/Jew?’). The options for answering ‘extent’ ques-tions were: 1 – Not at all different, they are similar; 2 –Differ a little; 3 – Very different; 4 – Totally different.The options for answering ‘possibility’ questions were:possible, maybe possible, or impossible, coded as 1, 2.5,and 4, respectively. Higher scores signified a higherdegree of essentialism. Analyses were conducted usingthe average scores in the questions composing thedifferent components. Parents performed at floor levelson the ‘physical distinctiveness’ component (i.e. eachgroup scored 1.3 or less on average) and thus their datawere not analyzed further.

(b) Stability task: This task – adapted from Hirschfeld(1996) – assesses beliefs about the developmentalstability of social categories. Participants were showntriads of line-drawn human characters – an adult andtwo children – representing a combination of twocategories. The categories used were ethnicity (Jew/Arab), social status (rich/poor), religiousness (religious/secular), body build (fat/thin), and profession (doctor/teacher). In each triad, each of the children resembledthe adult on one of the categories (e.g. ethnicity) butdiffered on the other (e.g. profession) (see Figure 2).The experimenter asked participants which of the twochildren in the pictures was the adult when he was achild. Participants saw a total of ten different triads,such that each category appeared on four triads. Givenour focus on ethnicity, the dependent measure was the



number of triads – out of the four in which ethnicity wasincluded – in which participants selected the ethnicitymatch (0–4). Parents performed at ceiling on this task(i.e. scored above 3.7 on average), and thus we did notanalyze their data further.(c) Adoption task: This task – adapted from Hirsch-

feld (1996) – assesses beliefs about the extent to whichsocial category membership is inherited. Altogether,participants were given a series of stories with differenttypes of category or attribute contrasts. Specifically,stories in which biological parents and caretakerscontrasted in terms of: religiosity (religious/secular),social status (poor/rich), physical attributes (tall/short,straight/curly hair), and psychological attributes (likeTV/books, like dogs/cats). Given the focus of the paper,we report only the data on the ethnicity stories. In these,participants were told a short story about a couple fromEthnicity A (e.g. Jews) who gave birth to a baby, but dueto the fact that they had to work for long hours, theyplaced the baby under the care of another couple – whobelonged to Ethnicity B (e.g. Arabs). The latter wasdescribed as taking care of and loving the baby. Theexperimenter asked participants, what will the baby’sethnicity be when he/she grows up: the biologicalparents’ or the caretakers’? The dependent measurewas the dichotomous choice of the participant, i.e. ascore of 1 for a choice of the biological parents, and 0for caretakers. The ethnicities of the biological parentsand caretakers were counterbalanced across partici-pants.

Political orientation measure

Parents filled out six questions from the Peace Index ofthe Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research (2005),which assessed their attitudes toward the Israeli–Pales-tinian conflict (see Appendix). Responses rendered asingle index, ranging from 0 – pro-negotiations orienta-tion, i.e. willingness to negotiate with Palestinians andgeneral belief about the possibility of achieving lastingpeace – to 1 – anti-negotiations orientation, i.e. unwill-ingness to negotiate and disbelief about the possibility oflasting peace.

Results

We first present analyses on children’s essentialist beliefs– our main ‘output’ measures. Next, we present analyseson differences among social groups on parents’ ‘input’measures. Finally, we report the main analyses, namely,correlations and regressions looking at the relationbetween parents’ input measures and children’s essen-tialism.

Social group effects on children’s essentialism

(a) ECQ: We conducted a MANOVA using social groupas the between-subjects factor, and children’s scores onthe three ECQ components as the dependent variables.The MANOVA revealed an overall significant effect ofsocial group, F(6, 144) = 3.38, p < .005, g2= .13. Theindividual ANOVAs revealed that the effect of socialgroup was significant only with regard to psychologicaldistinctiveness, F(2, 73) = 6.52, p < .005, g2= .15, andphysical distinctiveness, F (2, 73) = 3.29, p < .05, g2= .08.Scheffe post-hoc analyses revealed that on psychologicaldistinctiveness, religious children scored significantlyhigher than both secular and integrated children (ps <.05); on physical distinctiveness, secular children scoredsignificantly higher than religious children (p < .05, one-tailed). Figure 3a displays these data.(b) Stability task: An ANOVA using social group as

the between-subjects factor, and children’s scores on thestability task as the dependent variable, revealed that theeffect of social group was not significant (p > .3).Nonetheless, analyses against chance performance(chance = 2 selections of the ethnicity-match) revealedthat whereas children from the secular (M = 2.13, SD =.96) and integrated (M = 2.19, SD = 1.17) groupsselected no differently from chance, religious children(M = 2.52, SD = 1.18) selected ethnicity-matches signif-icantly more often than would be expected by chance, t(28) = 2.35, p < .05.

Figure 2 Example of ethnicity-profession triad in the stabilitytask.Note: The picture on the bottom-left is a profession match, andthe one on the bottom-right is an ethnicity match.



(c) Adoption task: A chi-square analysis comparing thenumber of children in the three social groups whoselected either the biological or adoptive parents revealedno difference across social groups, with a similarmajority of children from all groups determining theethnicity of the target baby according to the ethnicity ofthe biological parents (71% of secular children, 72% ofreligious, and 75% of integrated).

In sum, confirming previous findings with similarpopulations (Birnbaum et al., 2010; Deeb et al., 2011),we found that at age 5, there were slight differencesacross social groups in their essentialist beliefs towardsethnicity. These differences were indeed in the directionfound among older children in these previous studies,namely, religious children revealing the strongest essen-tialist beliefs and the integrated children the weakest.

Social group effects on parents’ measures

Essentialism

As reported in the Method, we analyzed parents’essentialism in terms of two components of the ECQ,and the Adoption task.

(a) ECQ: A MANOVA with social group as thebetween-subjects factor, and parents’ scores on thepsychological distinctiveness and heritability compo-nents of the ECQ as the dependent variables revealedan overall significant effect of social group, F(4, 146) =4.41, p < .005, g2= .11 (see Figure 3b). The individualANOVAs revealed that the effect of social group wassignificant both with regard to psychological distinctive-ness, F(2, 73) = 3.93, p < .05, g2= .10, and heritability, F(2, 73) = 5.91, p < .005, g2= .14. Scheffe post-hocanalyses revealed that on psychological distinctiveness,religious parents scored significantly higher than inte-grated parents; on heritability, religious parents scoredsignificantly higher than both integrated and secularparents (ps < .05).

(b) Adoption task: A chi-square analysis comparingthe number of parents in the three social groups whodetermined the ethnicity of the target baby according toeither the biological or adoptive parents revealed thatmore religious parents (38%) selected the biologicalparents than either integrated (13%) or secular (0%)parents, v2(2, 75) = 15.52, p < .001.

Political orientation

An ANOVA revealed a significant effect of social groupon parents’ political orientation scores, F(2, 73) = 29.91,p < .001, g2= .45. Confirming our assumption about thesamples, religious parents were the most anti-negotiation(M = .69, SD = .22), followed by secular parents(M = .39, SD = .19), and then integrated parents(M = .26, SD = .15; all post-hoc ps < .05, one-tailed).

Language measures

We conducted ANOVAs comparing parents’ speechfrom the three social groups in terms of all thecontent-full (four indices on valence, five on stereo-types, and three on contrasts), and formal indices (fouron labels and four on generics) described in theMethod. Table 2 displays the descriptive statistics forall these measures broken down by social group. Socialgroup only had a significant effect on the ‘contrastbias scores’, F(2, 73) = 3.60, p < .05, g2= .09, such thatreligious parents had higher scores than did secularparents (p < .05). For none of the absolute scores

Children

Adults

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

4

Psychological distinctiveness

Physical distinctiveness

Heritability

Deg

ree

of e

ssen

tial

ism

Essentialism Component

Religious Secular Integrated

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

4

Psychological distinctiveness

Physical distinctiveness

Heritability

Deg

ree

of e

ssen

tial

ism

Essentialism Component


(a)

(b)

Figure 3 Children’s (a) and adults’ (b) scores (and SEs) on thethree ECQ components, across social groups.



did we find a significant difference among socialgroups.In order to further evaluate possible differences across

social groups, we conducted one-sample t-tests against ano-bias criterion (i.e. a score of 0) on all ‘bias’measures. On valence, secular parents’ bias score wassignificantly lower than 0, t (30) = �1.89, p < .05 (one-tailed). In other words, they provided more negativethan positive statements about Arabs. Regarding ste-reotypes, secular parents’ bias score was significantlyhigher than 0, t(30) = 1.84, p < .05, and religiousparents’ score approached significance, t(28) = 1.68,p = .052 (one-tailed). Thus, parents from these groupstended to affirm more than negate stereotypes aboutJews and Arabs. In terms of contrasts, both secular andreligious parents’ bias scores were significantly higherthan 0, t(30) = 1.89, p < .05 (one-tailed), and t(28) =4.38, p < .05, respectively. In other words, parents fromthese groups provided more statements of differencesthan of similarities between Jews and Arabs. In terms ofthe categorization indices, on labeling we found that thebias scores of both religious, t(28) = 2.57, p < .05, andsecular, t(30) = 2.56, p < .05, parents were significantlyhigher than 0, but scores of the integrated parents werenot. Finally, on generics, only religious parents’ biasscore was significantly higher than 0, t(28) = 2.07,p < .05. That is, religious parents provided more labelsand generics when referring to Arabs than whenreferring to Jews, and secular parents did so in termsof labels.

Relations between parents’ belief measures, parents’language measures, and children’s essentialism

Correlational analyses

In order to start assessing the relations between parents’input measures and children’s essentialism, we con-ducted correlational analyses between parents’ measures(both beliefs and language) and children’s essentialismmeasures. Table 3 displays all the correlations betweenthe assessed measures.First, the analyses revealed certain inter-correlations

among parental measures. In particular, there werecorrelations among parents’ essentialism measures,between essentialism measures and political orientation,and among language measures. Importantly, there werealso a few correlations between parents’ belief andlanguage measures. Namely, political orientation signif-icantly correlated with parents’ contrast bias andfrequency of labeling Arabs, and parents’ ECQ herita-bility scores significantly correlated with parents’ gener-ics bias. These analyses suggest, first, that there was someconsistency in parents’ ethnicity-related beliefs, and alsoin the manner in which they spoke to their children aboutethnicity, and second, parents’ linguistic input mightserve as mediating variables for the transmission of theirbeliefs to children.For this latter implication, the second and more

central correlations were those between parental mea-sures and children’s essentialism. Here we found that

Table 2 Means (and SDs) of parents’ language measures

Language measure

Social group


Content Valence Bias (Pos – Neg) �0.07 (1.14) �0.19 (0.57) 0.01 (0.23)Positive 0.25 (0.77) 0.16 (0.48) 0.12 (0.37)Negative 0.32 (0.79) 0.36 (0.65) 0.11 (0.29)Total (Pos + Neg) 0.56 (1.08) 0.52 (1.00) 0.23 (0.64)

Stereotype Bias (Aff – Neg) 0.30 (0.97) 0.24 (0.74) �0.09 (0.52)Aff Arabs 0.11 (0.36) 0.13 (0.42) 0.00 (0.00)Neg Arabs 0.00 (0.00) 0.00 (0.00) 0.13 (0.50)Aff Jews 0.19 (0.87) 0.15 (0.47) 0.03 (0.12)Neg Jews 0.00 (0.00) 0.03 (0.19) 0.00 (0.00)

Contrasts Bias (Diff – Sim) 1.52 (1.87) 0.38 (1.16) 0.84 (2.04)Difference 1.60 (1.99) 0.69 (1.66) 1.06 (1.81)Similarity 0.09 (0.27) 0.31 (0.91) 0.22 (0.60)

Form Labels Bias (Arab – Jew) 1.19 (2.49) 1.66 (3.62) 0.77 (4.15)Total Arab 2.80 (3.97) 2.05 (3.76) 1.85 (3.34)Total Jew 1.61 (3.36) 0.39 (0.88) 1.08 (2.39)Total (Arab + Jew) 4.41 (6.93) 2.44 (4.09) 2.93 (4.07)

Generics Bias (Arab – Jew) 1.29 (3.35) �0.26 (2.71) 1.52 (4.73)Total Arab 3.90 (3.33) 2.59 (3.08) 3.76 (4.44)Total Jew 2.61 (2.06) 2.85 (2.79) 2.24 (2.12)Total (Arab + Jew) 6.50 (4.40) 5.44 (5.22) 6.00 (5.15)



children’s ECQ psychological distinctiveness scores cor-related with parents’ anti-negotiations political orienta-tion, generics bias score, generics Arab score, andstereotype bias score. The correlation with parents’tendency to select adoptive parents in the adoption taskapproached significance (p = .063). Furthermore, chil-dren’s stability scores significantly correlated with par-ents’ anti-negotiations political orientation, and labelingArab score. No other correlations were significant. Inparticular, there were no direct correlations betweenparents’ and children’s essentialism scores on corre-sponding measures.

Regressions

In our final analyses, we conducted regressions predict-ing children’s essentialism. We first conducted twostepwise regressions using as predicted variables thetwo measures of children’s essentialism identified in theabove analyses as being correlated with various parentalmeasures. We entered as predictors the child’s socialgroup and the parental indices listed in Table 3. Regres-sions excluding children’s social groups rendered similarresults to the ones presented here. Also, given theirredundancy, we conducted these regressions using gener-ics Arabs and label Arabs scores, instead of the respective‘bias’ scores. Regressions using the latter rendered verysimilar results. We present here the more theoreticallyintuitive regressions using the absolute Arab scores.

The regression on children’s ECQ psychologicaldistinctiveness scores revealed that only one of theparents’ input measures made a unique and significant

contribution, R2 = .08, F(1, 73) = 6.34, p < .05, namely,parents’ generics Arab score (Beta = .28, t = 2.52,p < .05). The contribution of parents’ political ideologyapproached significance (Beta = .22, t = 1.96, p = .054).The regression on children’s stability scores revealed thatonly one of the parents’ input measures made a uniqueand significant contribution, R2 = .05, F(1, 73) = 4.18,p < .05, namely, parents’ Arab labeling score (Beta = .23,t = 2.05, p < .05). In neither regression did social group,parents’ essentialism, or parents’ linguistic attitudinalindices make a significant contribution.

Following up on the findings from the above regres-sions and correlations, we conducted a set of regressionsin order to assess possible mediational models. Inparticular, these initial analyses intimated the plausibilityof two theoretical models, one for each of the children’sessentialism measures. For children’s ECQ psychologicaldistinctiveness scores, the model included parents’ polit-ical orientation as the independent factor, and parents’generics Arab scores as the mediator. For children’sstability scores, the model again included parents’political orientation as the independent factor, andparents’ labeling Arab scores as the mediator. Each ofthese models was assessed by conducting, first, thesimple linear regressions between the factors, then aregression including the independent and mediatorfactors to assess a possible reduction in the contributionof the independent factor, and finally a Sobel test on thecoefficients.

For the model on children’s ECQ psychologicaldistinctiveness scores, the simple regressions revealedthat although both parents’ political orientation (Beta =

Table 3 Correlations between parents’ and children’s measures

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Children’sessentialism

1. Psych. Dist. –2. Phys. Dist. .10 –3. Heritability .13 .20 –4. Stability .01 �.14 �.16 –5. Adopt. Parents �.19 .19 �.02 .11 –

Parents’essentialism

6. Psych. Dist. �.02 .14 .08 .11 �.10 –7. Heritability .16 �.16 �.04 .14 .05 .13 –8. Adopt. Parents �.22 .13 .13 �.14 .20 �.27 �.30 –

Parents’politicalorientation

9. Political Orientation .24 �.02 �.01 .23 �.06 .47 .36 �.36 –

Parents’language(content)

10. Valence bias �.03 �.19 .03 .07 .05 �.05 .06 .04 �.05 –11. Contrast bias .02 .01 �.03 .18 .19 .11 .03 .13 .31 .11 –12. Stereotype bias .23 .08 �.16 �.06 �.13 .04 .03 �.10 �.17 .03 .33 –

Parents’language(form)

13. Label Arabs .10 .08 �.12 .23 �.07 .04 .14 �.05 .24 .07 .35 .27 –14. Label bias .06 .09 �.21 .15 .03 �.10 .07 .05 .08 .06 .17 .13 .77 –15. Generics Arabs .28 �.11 �.15 .17 �.11 �.05 .11 �.04 .07 .07 .14 .31 .28 .23 –16. Generics bias .29 �.03 �.20 .15 �.01 �.02 .24 �.08 .06 .01 �.02 .13 .25 .23 .77 –

Note: Psych. Dist. = ECQ psychological distinctiveness score; Phys. Dist. = ECQ physical distinctiveness score; Adopt. Parents = Choice of adoptiveparents in Adoption task. Colored cells denote significant correlations, p < .05.



.24, t = 2.11, p < .05) and generics Arab scores (Beta =

.28, t = 2.51, p < .05) made significant contributions tochildren’s scores, parents’ political orientation did notsignificantly predict parents’ generics Arab scores(p = .54). Moreover, when both parents’ political orien-tation and generics about Arabs scores were enteredtogether into a model, the former remained a significantcontributor to children’s scores (Beta = .22, t = 2.00,p < .05). In other words, these results indicated that theeffect of parents’ political orientation on children’spsychological distinctiveness scores was not significantlymediated by parents’ generics use. In fact, the Sobel testrevealed that less than 8% of the effect of parents’political orientation on children’s psychological distinc-tiveness scores was mediated by parents’ use of genericsabout Arabs (p = .55).As for the model on children’s stability scores, the

simple regressions revealed that parents’ political orien-tation (Beta = .23, t = 2.05, p < .05) and labeling Arabscores (Beta = .23, t = 2.07, p < .05) made significantcontributions to children’s scores, and parents’ politicalorientation significantly predicted parents’ labeling Arabscores (Beta = .24, t = 2.08, p < .05). Moreover, whenboth parents’ scores were entered together into a model,political orientation was no longer a significant contrib-utor to children’s scores (Beta = .19, t = 1.63, p = .11).In other words, these results indicated that the effect ofparents’ political orientation on children’s stabilityscores seems to have been mediated by parents’ labelsuse. Nonetheless, the Sobel test revealed that just over19% of the effect of parents’ political orientation onchildren’s stability scores was mediated by parents’ useof labels about Arabs, a contribution that did not reachsignificance (p = .19).

Discussion

The goal of the present study was to examine which ofvarious sources of parental input significantly accountfor Israeli Jewish children’s essentialist beliefs aboutethnicity. To that end, we investigated parent–child dyadsfrom three populations in which children had beenpreviously shown to manifest different degrees of essen-tialism, and at an age in which such differences are juststarting to emerge (Birnbaum et al., 2010; Deeb et al.,2011) – patterns that were confirmed in the present study.The present study revealed clear and fairly cohesive

social group differences amongst parents regardingvarious markers of ethnic attitudes and beliefs. Overall,religious parents were more essentialist about ethnicitythan the other groups of parents, were more againstnegotiations with Palestinians, and were more biased in

their attitudes and emphases on categorization whentalking about ethnicity to their children – although onsome linguistic indices, secular parents often manifestedsimilar levels. It is interesting to point out in terms of thelanguage measures that parents from the three differentsocial groups did not differ systematically on theabsolute frequency of use of the various indices. Forinstance, parents from the integrated group used labelsand generics about Arabs to the same extent as religiousand secular parents. Nonetheless, only the latter twomanifested a significant bias on these indices, using themmore often in regard to Arabs than Jews.The critical question was which of these various

sources of variation in parents’ input most contributedto children’s ethnic essentialism. The correlationalanalyses revealed that almost all sources contributed.One interesting finding to note in this regard is that thesevarious sources made a contribution only in regard totwo of the children’s essentialism measures assessed here:beliefs about the developmental stability of ethnicmembership, and beliefs about fundamental psycholog-ical differences between ethnicities. We offer two possibledirections for interpreting this finding. First, technically,it is possible that in some measures there was lessvariability in children’s responses, thus making it hard tofind co-variation with the parental measures. This wascertainly the case for the Adoption task, which struc-turally limited the variance in responses. A moreconceptual explanation has to do with the fact thatyoung children’s essentialist beliefs about psychologicaltraits have been found to be fairly incoherent (Gelman,Heyman & Legare, 2007), something that was replicatedin the correlational analyses reported here. Thus itshould not be too surprising that we did not findconsistency across the different measures in terms oftheir relations to parental measures. Following this line,it appears that the measures in which we did not findlinks are the ones most ‘biological’ in nature (e.g. ECQheritability component; see Haslam et al., 2002, for adiscussion). In other words, perhaps parental inputmodulates children’s essentialist beliefs vis-�a-vis charac-teristics of social categories that children a priori view asmore malleable: people’s preferences, beliefs, and aspi-rations. Importantly, Haslam and colleagues found thatit was precisely these aspects of essentialist thinking thatwere most strongly associated with prejudice.The correlational findings notwithstanding, when all

sources were entered into regressions, the one that mostreliably contributed to children’s ethnic essentialism wasparents’ linguistic marking of ethnic categories – i.e.their use of labels and generics, primarily in regard toArabs. This is somewhat of a counter-intuitive finding.After all, it attests that even though there were correla-



tions between parents’ own essentialist beliefs, theirexplicit articulation of fundamental differences betweenJews and Arabs, and their use of labels and generics, itwas precisely these latter, more implicit and formalmarkers of the conversation that contributed to chil-dren’s essentialism. The only belief-related parentalsource that also contributed was political orientation,although it contributed to only one of the essentialismmeasures, and the contribution was negligible whenentered into regression models.

On the one hand, it could be argued that the abovepattern of relations between parental input and chil-dren’s essentialist beliefs is analogous to relations foundregarding attitudes. There too it was parents’ implicitattitudes or behaviors – not explicit ones – that mostcontributed to children’s racial attitudes (Castelli et al.,2009; Pahlke et al., 2012). On the other hand, it isimportant to point out certain substantive differencesbetween these two sets of findings.

First, part of the conclusions drawn in the abovestudies as to why it was parents’ implicit rather thanexplicit racial attitudes that predicted children’s racialattitudes had to do with the social undesirability orunacceptability of negative attitudes. In other words,parents’ explicit responses may not have reliably cap-tured their attitudes. Here we found that although therelikely was also an element of social desirability, parentswere fairly open about their political orientation, and didnot shy away from expressing ethnic essentialist beliefs orendorsing stereotypes and negative attitudes towardsArabs. Evidence for this was the reliable differencesacross parents’ social groups on all these dimensions,and the fact that many of these parental measures inter-correlated. A further implication of this observation isthat the pattern of findings reported here might nottranslate universally, for instance, to cultures wherediscussions about racial differences are less acceptable(Pahlke et al., 2012; Pauker et al., 2010). In a sense,though, it is all the more surprising that despite therelative tolerance to explicit ethnic attitudes in the Israelipolitical environment, it was still the implicit markers ofthe conversations, rather than the explicit ones, thatcontributed the most to children’s ethnic essentialism. Inthis regard, it is also possible that whereas the implicitmarkers play a crucial role in the formation of youngchildren’s essentialist beliefs, as children mature parents’explicit markers become more significant – perhapscontributing to the larger differences in the ethnicessentialism of 8- and 12-year-olds from the groupsinvestigated here (Deeb et al., 2011).

A second important difference between the two bodiesof work is that, whereas the relations reported in thework on attitudes revolved around the same construct

(parents’ and children’s attitudes), here the relationswere between distinct constructs (parents’ linguisticmarkers of categories and children’s essentialist beliefs).In other words, whereas parents might somehow man-ifest their implicit attitudes via subtle behavioral cues(Castelli, De Dea & Nesdale, 2008), it is less clear howparents transmitted essentialist beliefs via formal lin-guistic markers. In fact, our mediational analyses did notreveal systematic mediation of parents’ political attitudesvia their language use. The only indication in this regardwas that political attitudes might have been partlytransmitted via parents’ labeling of Arabs. Evidently, itis possible that parents transmit their attitudes in verbalor non-verbal ways that were not manifested in thepresent task or that were not caught by our codingcategories. It is also possible that our sample size did notprovide enough power to capture trends that existed inthe data. Clearly, how parents’ beliefs and attitudestranslate into cues that children can pick up on remainsan issue for future studies. What the present study doesmake clear is that categorization cues manifest in theparents’ speech indeed predict children’s ethnic essen-tialism.

In general, we raise two alternative explanations forthe privileged status of formal linguistic categorizationmarkers as instigators of children’s essentialism. Thefirst explanation is that such linguistic markers may domore than simply mark categories; they might actuallycarry substantive conceptual implications (Carey, 1995).The argument is that category labels (a) make thecategory – rather than the individual exemplar – salient,and (b) imply that what is being said is generalizableacross exemplars. Especially in the context of socialcategories, Waxman (2013) notes that labels may in factpoint out to children which distinctions available in theenvironment are to be treated as firm bases for induc-tion. Generics further imply that the category has deep,inherent, and stable characteristics that are resistant toexceptions. And in fact, generics have been shown tocorrelate with adults’ own essentialist thinking, both inexperimental set-ups (Rhodes et al., 2012) and in naturaldiscourse (Gelman et al., 2004), and developmentalstudies reveal that the use of count-noun labels (Gelman& Heyman, 1999) and generics (Cimpian & Markman,2011) impact children’s essentialization of a category.Following this argument, it was expected that the morechildren in our study were exposed to labels and genericsin reference to ethnicity, the more they were to inferthat ethnic groups are deeply, inherently, and stablydifferent.

A second explanation argues that essentialism per sedoes not derive from linguistic markers, but instead is anintuitive conceptualization of social kinds (Gil-White,



2001; Hirschfeld, 1996). In this view, what linguisticcategorization forms do is point out to children therelevant social kinds onto which essentialism should bemapped. Essentialism, in this case, is a placeholdernotion attached to categories about which children knowvery little. This could explain why social essentialism isfound even in cultures where parents do not endorse it(Astuti, Solomon & Carey, 2004), and is supported byfindings of negative correlations between children’sfamiliarity with ethnic categories and ethnic essentialism(Deeb et al., 2011). Following this argument, labelingand generics contributed to children’s essentialismbecause they are prime creators of novel categories(Waxman, 2013) – precisely the kinds of categories thatessentialism preys on. It is interesting to note in thisregard that it was primarily the use of labels and genericsregarding Arabs – the out-group – that contributed tochildren’s essentialism. This raises the possibility thatchildren’s essentialism derives not so much from amotivation to identify with those similar to oneself, butinstead from a motivation to differentiate oneself fromothers.The more general conclusion is that whatever the role

of category markers in the generation of social essen-tialism turns out to be, the present findings substantiatethe idea that social essentialism is not transmitted byparents to their children via explicit and systematiccommunication of intergroup values, beliefs, or attitudes.Rather, the transmission process is more subtle andconstructive, arguably building on the resonance betweenthe semantic implications of how parents talk, andchildren’s own conceptual dispositions.

Acknowledgments

This research was conducted with the support of grantno. 621/05, from the Israel Science Foundation, to GilDiesendruck. We are grateful to the teachers, parents,and especially children, for their participation in thestudies. We would like to thank the following researchassistants for help with data collection: Liza Amichai,Maya Asor, Hadas Detelkremer, Noa Hermesh, NataliIsraeli, Gili Katz, Aya Lael, and Michal Levinsky.

Authorship note

G. Segall and G. Diesendruck developed the study idea.All authors contributed to the study design. G. Segallcoordinated the data collection, transcription, coding,and analyses. G. Segall and G. Diesendruck analysed thedata. G. Diesendruck drafted the paper. All authors

provided critical comments, and approved the finalversion of the paper for submission.

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Received: 17 September 2013Accepted: 8 July 2014

Appendix

Parents’ Political Orientation Questionnaire

a) What is your opinion regarding a peace negotiationbetween Israel and the Palestinian authority? (1 –strongly in favor, to 4 – strongly against)

b) Do you believe that an Israeli–Palestinian negotiationwill lead to peace in the coming years? (1 – stronglybelieve, to 4 – strongly don’t believe)

c) There are people who argue that as long as Israelkeeps the occupied territories, Palestinians will keepperforming terrorist actions. Others argue that even ifIsrael ceases its occupation of Palestinian territories,Palestinian attacks will not stop and might even getworse. Which of these two claims is closer to youropinion? (1 – first, 2 – second)

d) How would you prefer the state of Israel to defineitself ? (1 – an Arab state, 2 – a state of all its citizens(Arabs and Jews), 3 – a bi-national state, 4 – a Jewishdemocratic state, 5 – the Jewish people’s state)

e) How can we improve relations between Arab andJewish citizens in Israel? (1 – through joint social andeconomic meetings, 2 – I don’t have an opinion, 3 –through joint political activity, 4 – through equalitybetween Jews and Arabs, 5 – it’s hard to improve therelations, 6 – there is no need to improve)

f) Would you be interested in participating in suchactivities? (1 – Yes, 2 – No opinion, 3 – No)



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