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

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

As illustrated in the epigraph, incidents of social intolerance are rampant in society, propagated even by heads of states. As part of the quest to help uncover ways to annihilate such attitudes, psychological research has demonstrated that exposure to foreign cultures provides a useful approach to reducing intergroup bias (Tadmor, Hong, Chao, Wiruchnipawan, & Wang, 2012). Although, historically, research has focused on personal contact experiences with outgroup members (e.g., Allport, 1954; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006), more recent research has expanded the definition of exposure to include not only interpersonal contact experiences but all experiences of encountering or interacting with elements of foreign cultures, including eating foreign cuisine or listening to foreign music (Leung, Maddux, Galinsky, & Chiu, 2008). These multicultural experiences have been shown to successfully reduce stereotyping, prejudice, and discriminatory judgments, while also promoting racial engagement (e.g., Crisp & Turner, 2011; Gurin, Dey, Hurtado, & Gurin, 2002; Tadmor, Satterstrom, Jang, & Polzer, 2012).

One way these effects have been demonstrated to occur is through their impact on motivated cognition. Specifically, exposure to multicultural experiences is thought to call into question the accuracy of long-held beliefs, practices, and assumptions as people are exposed to new information that is distinct, inconsistent, or even contradictory to internalized schemas. Rather than seize and freeze on existing preconceptions to achieve quick and firm conclusions, individuals become motivated by a lower need for cognitive closure, which motivates people to entertain alternative hypotheses and to question existing assumptions. In turn, reliance on existing knowledge structures, including prejudiced perception, is reduced (e.g., Crisp & Turner, 2011; Gurin et al., 2002; Roets, Kruglanski, Kossowska, Pierro, & Hong, 2015; Tadmor, Hong, Chao, Wiruchnipawan, & Wang, 2012).

However, this research has focused exclusively on how people’s multicultural experience can help themselves become more tolerant. Research has yet to investigate whether the effect of multicultural experience can extend beyond the self. Could adults’ multicultural experience act as a precursor to more tolerant children? Our expectation for a positive intergenerational effect of parental multicultural experience on children’s tolerance builds on both the extended contact literature and sociodevelopmental theories of child socialization. The extended contact literature suggests that simply knowing that an intimate ingroup member, such as a parent, has positive interactions with members of other cultures will diminish prejudice (e.g., Tausch, Herwstone, Schmid, Hughes, & Cairns, 2011). Extrapolating to the broader context of multicultural experience, it is possible that greater parental multicultural experience will have a direct effect on children’s tolerance (Figure 1, path E) because it signifies to children that contact with elements and people of foreign cultures should be embraced.

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Figure 1.

Serial multiple mediator model for influence of maternal multicultural experience.

And yet, young children may be unable to draw direct conclusions from their parents’ experiences without further instruction. Indeed, sociodevelopmental theories would suggest a more indirect route for how parents’ multicultural experiences could affect their children’s degree of social tolerance. This literature has highlighted parents’ major role as socializing agents for their children, especially during early childhood, in which they take on the role of teachers, models, and disciplinarians (Allport, 1954; Bandura, 1986; Bigler & Liben, 2006; Nastie, Diamond, & Bar-Tal, 2015). According to this research, children perceive their parents as ultimate sources of epistemic authority, whereby parents act as filters and interpreters of how children view the social world (Miklikowska, 2016; Nastie et al., 2015). As such, parents’ explicit and implicit attitudes about outgroup members may serve as powerful models to children’s prejudice and tolerance. As they seek parental approval, children may learn through observation and imitation of their parents’ views. They may learn from parents’ direct instructions about what views they should and should not hold. And they may learn from parents’ reward and punishment of what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate attitudes. Thus, as a whole, these processes would suggest a serial multiple mediator model in which child tolerance would arise through a more indirect pathway, whereby parents’ higher levels of multicultural experiences would yield reductions in need for cognitive closure, thereby fostering greater social tolerance in parents, and these higher levels of tolerance in adults will transfer to higher levels of intergroup tolerance in their children (Figure 1, path A-B-C). Notably, although little research has explored antecedents to intergenerational correspondence in intergroup attitudes, a recent meta-analysis has successfully demonstrated a significant concordance in parent–child intergroup attitudes (Degner & Dalege, 2013), with these results also corroborated in longitudinal investigations (Miklikowska, 2016).

In the current research, we test both the direct model and the indirect (serial multiple mediator) model in samples of Jewish-Israelis (Study 1a) and Palestinian-Israelis (Study 1b). Testing both groups using similar methods allows us to examine generalizability of the effect to both majority and minority cultural members. Furthermore, measuring the attitudes that each of these samples has toward the other group offers a conservative test for our hypotheses given the generally strained relationship that exists between Israeli-Jews and Israeli-Palestinians which is fueled by the ongoing intractable Israeli–Palestinian conflict (Nastie et al., 2015). For both groups, we chose to focus on fourth graders because research has shown that children of this age are developmentally amenable to prejudice reduction and that after Grade 4, parents begin to lose their credibility as a primary source of epistemic knowledge (Raabe & Beelmann, 2011). We further chose to focus on mothers rather than on both parents because previous research has shown that children’s racial attitudes are generally more aligned with those of their mother, especially in cultures with segmented gender roles, like those in the Middle East, in which mothers have greater responsibility for child rearing and as such are stronger socializing forces (e.g., Bar-Tal, Raviv, Raviv, & Brosh, 1991; Castelli, Zogmaister, & Tomelleri, 2009; Zughayar, 1995).