About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 13. Moral Development

Abstract

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The increasing gridlocks and political antagonism in the U.S. government calls for an increased understanding of how divisive political partisanship emerges. For example, how well do children know what political identities mean and do they form ingroup versus outgroup tendencies based on political membership? From a larger study on children’s political partisanship, we specifically report (1) whether children can explain differences among U.S. political parties and (2) whether children’s understanding of the differences between political parties predict their ingroup preferences based on political party membership.
The larger study was conducted from May 2023 to April 2024 with 177 U.S. parent-child dyads (6- to 12-year-olds; M=9.07 years). Here, we focus on children’s responses to political parties. Children were interviewed about their own political party affiliation (“When you are old enough to vote, which political party would you vote for?”) and asked open-ended questions about if they know any differences between Democrats and Republicans, and if they know what an independent voter is. We coded these open-ended responses into (1) whether children articulate a meaningful difference versus not and, (2) what reasoning children used to explain these differences based on a coding scheme by Lay et al. (2022) (Tables 1 and 2). In addition, children completed a political party preference task, in which they saw 8 trials of three adults and what political party each person supports (Democrat, Republican, and Independent) and asked who they liked the most.
Only 13.79% of children knew a meaningful difference between Democrats and Republicans and this increased with age (β=0.32, t=2.93, p=0.003). Only 8% of children could describe what an independent voter is, which also increased with age (β=0.34, t=3.28, p=0.001). Children who could identify meaningful differences between Democrats and Republicans were more likely to self-identify with a political party during the interview compared to children who could not articulate meaningful differences (β=0.20, t=2.26, p=0.03), suggesting that knowing the differences between political parties impacts children’s likelihood to identify with a political party. These children were also more likely to prefer people who matched their own party preferences compared to children who did not articulate meaningful differences (β=0.22, t=2.40, p=0.02), indicating that knowledge of political parties may also lead children to show more preferences based on political parties. When children knew what an independent voter was, it did not predict whether they self-identified with a political party or preferred people who matched their own party preferences compared to children who did not know what an Independent voter was (ps > .06). These results suggest that children’s political knowledge does not necessarily indicate that children have a political party identification, especially knowledge of independent voters. However, such knowledge may still encourage children to develop more partisanship or ingroup tendencies for political groups, suggesting that ingroup tendencies for political parties may develop along with children’s increasing knowledge of politics.

Author information

Author	Role
Gabriella Onderdonk, University of Michigan	Presenting author
Genevieve Greco, University of California, Santa Cruz	Non-presenting author
Annie Schwartzstein, University of California, Santa Cruz	Non-presenting author
Hyesung Grace Hwang, University of California, Santa Cruz	Non-presenting author

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