Alaina Brenick

Moral judgments about Jewish-Arab intergroup exclusion: The role of cultural identity and contact

Prejudice and discrimination as justifications for social exclusion are often viewed as violations of the moral principles of welfare, justice, and equality, but intergroup exclusion can also often be viewed as a necessary and legitimate means to maintain group identity and cohesion (Rutland, Killen, & Abrams, 2010). The current study was guided by the social reasoning developmental perspective (Killen & Rutland, 2011) to examine the moral judgments of social exclusion encounters, and the degree to which cultural identity and actual contact with members of other cultural groups is related to social evaluations. Surprisingly, no research has examined how intergroup contact bears on moral judgments about Jewish-Arab encounters in the United States. The current study surveyed 241 Jewish and 249 non-Arab/non-Jewish (comparison group) 14- and 17-year-olds to assess their cultural identification, intergroup contact, and moral judgments regarding intergroup peer social exclusion situations between Jewish and Arab youth in peer, home, and community contexts. Participants overwhelmingly rejected exclusion of an outgroup member explicitly because of their group membership. Context effects emerged, and exclusion was rated as most acceptable in the community context and least acceptable in the peer context. Three factors of identity (i.e., exploration, commitment, and concern for relationships) were explored. Generally, higher identity commitment and lower identity concern for relationships were related to more inclusive evaluations. Interactions between the identity factors and intergroup contact and cultural group, however, differentially predicted evaluations of intergroup exclusion.

Social Understanding in Young Israeli-Jewish, Israeli-Palestinian, Palestinian, and Jordanian Children: Moral Judgments and Stereotypes

Research Findings: An empirical investigation was conducted to test young Palestinian, Jordanian, Israeli-Palestinian, and Israeli-Jewish childrens (N = 433; M = 5.7 years of age) cultural stereotypes and their evaluations of peer intergroup exclusion based upon a number of different factors, including being from a different country and speaking a different language. Children in this study lived in a geographical region that has a history of cultural and religious tension, violence, and extreme intergroup conflict. Our findings reveal that the negative consequences of living with intergroup tension are related to the use of stereotypes. At the same time, the results for moral judgments and evaluations about excluding peers provide positive results about the young childrens inclusive views regarding peer interactions. Practice: These findings indicate that practitioners working with young children should focus on inclusion in peer contexts. Curricula, media, and social intervention programs must begin in early childhood before children begin to use stereotypes in peer situations, particularly when children from other cultural and ethnic backgrounds play together.

The Intergenerational Effect of Maternal Multicultural Experience on Children’s Tolerance: An Example From Palestinians and Jews in Israel

Although recent research has demonstrated the benefits of multicultural experience for reducing personal levels of intergroup bias, the potential for an intergenerational effect has yet to be explored. Using samples of Jewish-Israeli (Study 1a) and Palestinian-Israeli (Study 1b) mother–child dyads, we found that maternal multicultural experience was indirectly related to greater social tolerance among children via lower levels of maternal need for cognitive closure which, in turn, triggered higher levels of maternal social tolerance. These results show that when it comes to multicultural experience, its impact can extend beyond the self to also affect the next generation. Implications for developmental theories of prejudice acquisition and prejudice interventions are discussed.

Internationally Comparative Research on Minority and Immigrant Adolescents' Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Development

The study of immigrant youth development has been an issue for numerous decades now, and research in this area can only be expected to grow further because of the unprecedented increase in international migration [1] and the high and ever increasing rates of young (15e29 years) newcomer migrants worldwide. Population growth in many developed countries (e.g., throughout Europe and the US) is driven increasingly by positive net migration and decreasingly by natural population increases [2]. This means that greater proportions of these populations will comprise youth with immigrant backgrounds. Thus, it is not surprising that researchers find it essential to investigate the physical and mental health of immigrant adolescents as well as their satisfaction with life. With the development of this field of research, however, there have emerged two core guiding issues: first, the methodological approaches used and viewed as most appropriate to comprehensively understand the immigrant development [3,4], and second, the theoretical perspectives postulating how immigration itself might be a positive versus negative experience in the development of immigrants [5]. In the following section we will discuss how the article by Stevens et al. [6] falls along these two core issues. The field of acculturation research, particularly on adolescent immigrants, has grown dynamically over the past decades, which is demonstrated in the number of publications in immigrant adolescents (Figure 1). As research on acculturation was only just beginning, the primary methodological approach focused on the importance of group-level changes as a result of migration with the basic idea that immigrants would/should adapt to the new culture while shedding their heritage [7]. This thinking was followed by a more differentiated view on multidimensional adaptation, an emphasis on individual differences in the psychological and sociocultural adjustment and on cross-cultural comparisons [4]. Although the diversification in acculturation research provided a more comprehensive understanding of the complex acculturation processes, it also created a research gap on the universality and specificity of acculturation processes. Hence, presently, there has been a call for researchers to uncover both unique and universal experiences of immigrant youth, using cross-comparative designs [3]. Moreover, this has further been met with calls by others over the need for research to attend to the contextual