Prejudice in children and extremism in adults: Intriguing mindset convergences

Abstract

In the literature on children’s interpersonal and intergroup relations, it is inappropriate to say a child is ‘racist’ even in the evidence of the White child refusing to sit near a Black peer in class, or vice versa, or allying with friends to bully that same peer at school. In such cases, this child’s behavior has been referred to as out-group prejudice. Racial prejudice is bound to develop into any of the multiple types of extremism. This article explores the similarities between the adult extremist mindset and children’s prejudice. We present the conceptual constituents of both the extremist mindset and prejudice, and then discuss the convergences between the two; we later present the convergences in the determinants of both extremism and prejudice. The exploration of such convergences allows us to posit that prejudice in childhood may be a marker for extremism in adulthood. The recommendation is therefore to incite researchers to look more into the prejudiced mindset in childhood as a potential marker of the adult extremist mindset, and intervention policy makers to look into factors that buffer the further development of children’s prejudiced mindset into extremist polarized views about the world.

Introduction

In the literature on children’s interpersonal and intergroup relations, it is inappropriate to say a child is racist even in the evidence of the White child refusing to sit near a Black peer in class, or allying with friends to bully that same peer at school. In such cases, this child’s behavior has been described as an instance of out-group prejudice (Aboud, 2003; Allport, 1954; Augoustinos and Rosewarne, 2001; Bar-Tal, 1996; Brewer, 1999, 2001; Cameron et al., 2001; Enesco et al., 2005; Fitzroy and Rutland, 2010). Racial/ethnic prejudice has been found to facilitate school bullying triggered by children’s cultural background (Iannello et al., 2021), with ethnic minority youth being more often targets of harassment than ethnic majority youth, and immigrant youth consistently scoring higher on racist victimization than native youth (Strohmeier et al., 2011). Racial and ethnic minority youth who are targeted due to a socially stigmatized identity such as gender or sexual identity, race, ethnicity, or immigrant status are at high risk for negative mental health and behavioral outcomes throughout the lifespan (Xu et al., 2020).

Racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia are considered today as explanations for the growing influence of extremist parties and organizations in a substantial number of countries all over the world perpetrating threats and assaults on migrant groups. Racist and xenophobic crimes as well as the mainstreaming of elements of extremist ideology in political and public discourses are on the rise throughout the world (FRA – European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2013a, 2013b). At the school and community levels, racial/ethnic minority, immigrant, and refugee youth are disproportionately targeted under the powerful influence of stereotypes and discrimination (Sapouna et al., 2022).

The development of racial prejudice or racism has been well documented in children’s literature: children, within the first years of life, learn to develop ideas about race very easily through their parents, the school they go to, and society in general, and by preschool age, they begin showing both implicit and explicit biases toward members of other races. By school age, in-group bias (preference of one’s group) and out-group bias are well established (Killen et al., 2022; Weir, 2021). Research in social learning theory shows that the influence of radical peers in childhood and adolescence through imitation, modeling, conditioning, and reinforcement, as well as mechanisms such as fear of ridicule or the desire for loyalty, is the strongest predictor of violent extremism, suggesting that in-group/out-group biases that form in small peer like-minded groups can lead to extreme forms of violent expression and groupthink (Lafree et al., 2018).

In their research on extremism, Saucier et al. (2009) and Stankov et al. (2010) note that ordinary people may have a natural tendency toward extremist thinking; one only needs to look at the state of the world today to confirm that extremism is a phenomenon that is found in all cultures at all times. Tileaga (2014: 4) says that ‘we live in a world where it is not difficult to find examples of extreme forms of social hostility’. He adds that the extremist person is an actor on every society’s scene, belonging to every society’s collection of social types. The portrait of the extremist is a ‘universal portrait, with particular aspects linked to a specific sociocultural context fading in the background’ (Tileaga, 2014: 8).

Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed in psychology to understand and explain how one becomes extremist: early psychoanalytical theories stressed narcissistic needs while personality theories focused on predispositions; social learning theory addressed environmental contingencies; cognition theories emphasized the quest for personal significance; and social identity theory (SIT) focused on the need for belonging and affiliation. No single theory has gained ascendance in explaining the roots of the extremist mindset.

And just as extremism seems to be more common than exceptional among people (Saucier et al., 2009; Stankov et al., 2010; Tileaga, 2014), prejudice is rampant across all societies and cultures; Allport (1954: 11) says that prejudiced thinking ‘exists just as surely in caste societies, in slave societies or countries believing in witchcraft as in ethically more sensitive societies’. Hayes et al. (2002: 6) explain that prejudice is ‘shockingly common’ due to the fact that it is based on stereotypes, and stereotypes involve the same heuristic frame as other problem-solving strategies humans use in making sense of their social world, and never truly disappear. Described by Hogg and Abrams (1998) as a fundamental and probably universal bias in perception and a central component of prejudice, stereotyping has far-reaching consequences for behavior that range from relatively benign jokes to horrific practices such as genocide. Stereotypes are ‘factually incorrect, rigid and resistant to education, and are generated by suboptimal reasoning processes’ (Hogg and Abrams, 1998: 58).

This article discusses the points of convergence between the prejudiced and the extremist mindsets in terms of their (1) conceptual constituents and (2) their determinants. The aim of such a discussion is to incite researchers to look more into the prejudiced mindset in childhood as a potential marker of the adult extremist mindset, and intervention policy makers to look into factors that buffer the further development of children’s prejudiced mindset into extremist polarized views about the world.

The conceptual constituents of the prejudiced mindset

In his seminal book The Nature of Prejudice, Allport (1954) defines prejudice as a form of thinking about others that bears two components: an unfounded judgment and a feeling. Although prejudices may be positive or negative, Allport focuses on negative prejudice and defines it as any negative judgment of a group as a whole without sufficient warrant (Allport, 1954: 7). The constituents of the prejudiced mindset, as described below, are derived from the first four chapters of the book.

The first constituent of prejudice is overcategorization, the natural and commonest trick of the human mind, says Allport, for life’s demands for practical adjustments are so great that ‘we have to decide whether objects are good or bad by classes [. . .]. Rough and ready rubrics, however coarse, have to suffice’ (Allport, 1954: 9). Such ‘rubrics are essential to mental life’ (Allport, 1954: 24).

The second constituent of prejudice is its inflexibility: a prejudice is actively and emotionally resistant to any evidence or knowledge that would contradict it. Third, prejudice is not to be confused with moral connotations dictated by society or cultures for each society and culture has its own ways to judge or evaluate particular other groups or particular other societies (i.e. groups and societies that are different from the accepted and approved paradigms of normality and morality).

The fourth constituent of prejudice is its functional significance: a negative attitude about others is not a prejudice unless it serves a self-gratifying purpose for the person who bears it, even if that self-gratifying purpose is blind conformity with the prevailing folk culture of one’s affiliation group, in which case the gratification results from the sense of belonging and the feeling of security that belongingness yields to the individual. A fifth constituent of prejudice is the embedded mechanism of rationalization used by prejudiced people to accommodate their beliefs about particular others (beliefs that can be rationally attacked and eventually altered by the presentation of rational, factual yet contradictory evidence) to their negative intransigent and unshakable attitudes about those others. The more intense these attitudes are, the more likely they are to result in hostile action against the others. This leads us to the sixth constituent of prejudice: discrimination. Segregation of others is the best example of discrimination (excluding others from certain types of employment, from residential housing, educational opportunities, political rights, social privileges, etc.). Physically assaulting the other is the expression of prejudice under conditions of heightened emotions, while the ultimate violent expression of prejudice is extermination of the other.

The seventh constituent of prejudice is self-love (or narcissism, in Freudian terms). Allport (1954) says, ‘One must first overestimate the things one loves before one can underestimate their contraries’ (p. 25). Attachments to the things we love (family, community, friendship circles) are essential to life and we tend to overgeneralize our categories of attachment and affection, protecting and defending them, while manifesting our antagonism to others’ categories of attachment and affection. The little child must love and identify with someone or something before they can learn what to hate. Thus, our hatred for others springs from our love for ourselves: we live in the group, by the group and sometimes for the group, and ‘hostility toward out-groups helps strengthen our sense of belonging’ (Allport, 1954: 42).

The eighth constituent of the prejudiced mindset is the loyalty to one’s in-group. Here, Allport distinguishes between the in-group and the reference group, a group that is ‘warmly accepted or a group in which the individual wishes to be included’ (Allport, 1954: 37). Belonging to this group allows the members to share a common identity, what Berger (2018) refers to as ‘an identity collective, a group of people who are defined by nation, religion, race, or some other shared trait, interest or concern’ (Berger, 2018: 24). In the case of an individual belonging to a minority group (the in-group), the majority may be their reference group, and although the majority may exert a strong pull upon them forcing attitudinal conformity, the in-group is never repudiated. One prefers one’s in-group preferences, because people have a natural tendency to admire and be loyal to their own in-groups, and in extremist movements, this tendency is vastly amplified yielding a perception of the out-group as a menacing enemy (Berger, 2018). If, on the other hand, one’s in-group approves of tolerance for other groups, then one would practice tolerance of other groups. In sum, the source of prejudice lies in the needs and habits that reflect the influence of in-group membership upon the development of one’s personality and attitudes.

The ninth constituent of prejudice is hostility toward the out-group: because of the importance of one’s in-group for one’s survival and self-esteem, one develops partisanship and ethnocentrism with respect to their in-group. The prejudiced individual defines one’s loyalties in terms of ‘the other side of the fence’ (Allport, 1954: 48). To the prejudiced individual, rejecting out-groups is a salient need.

Allport’s book has incited a plethora of empirical studies to better understand the nature, prevalence, and formation of prejudice in children (Aboud, 2003; Augoustinos and Rosewarne, 2001; Bar-Tal, 1996; Brewer, 1999, 2001; Cameron et al., 2001; Enesco et al., 2005; Fitzroy and Rutland, 2010). In these studies, out-group prejudice was shown to emerge due to the child’s lay theory that ‘what is similar to me is good, and what is different from me is bad’ (Cameron et al., 2001: 118). These studies also show that children’s racial awareness is clearly present in preschool age children, and that in-group favoritism emerges from the third year, culminating in the fifth year, and is accompanied by the rejection of the other (out-group prejudice), a process that is fostered by the child’s acquisition of social stereotypes about other groups (Killen et al., 2022). Prejudice against different others arises from the interaction between personal developmental changes and surrounding social factors such as the influence of prejudiced parents, what is portrayed in the media, or the existence of conflict with an enemy state (Brewer, 2001; Cameron et al., 2001).

In-group favoritism in the literature on children prejudice, such as the one described by Sherif in his classic Robbers Cave experiment (Gaertner et al., 2000), shows that the more committed children are toward their in-group, the more strongly they are likely to react to the out-group; thus, in-group favoritism may be a driver of out-group negativity (Verkuyten, 2021). As Killen et al. (2022) say, in-group favoritism and intergroup biases underlying systemic racism start long before adulthood: children, even before entering grade school, display blatant signs of intergroup biases which is typically associated with prejudicial attitudes, and children are both the victims and the perpetrators of such biases.

Seen through a Piagetian lens, in-group favoritism stems from the child’s egocentrism and is necessary for their understanding of the social world: little children assume that attitudes arising out of their own special surroundings (their in-group) are the ‘only ones possible’ (Piaget and Weil, 1951: 562). Piaget believes that egocentrism does not disappear completely; it is bound to re-emerge in later stages of development, especially in times of distress, in the form of what he calls sociocentrism. Piaget’s sociocentrism is very evident today in light of the demographic changes and the diversification of ethnic fabrics that have occurred as a result of the massive influx of immigrants and refugees to the West. A blatant example of sociocentrism would be the rising waves of racism all over the world against Asians, due to the COVID-19 pandemic (Croucher et al., 2020).

The conceptual constituents of the extremist mindset

Although ‘extremism does not have a universal, objective and undisputed definition’ (Kilp, 2011: 11), most writers on the topic of extremism describe it as a mindset consisting of profound attitudes and beliefs that do not fit with mainstream opinion regarding political, religious, and/or ideological issues, and that oppose the fundamental values of society and the principles of democracy and universal human rights (Knight et al., 2022; Trip et al., 2019a). Berger (2018) states that ‘extremism is part of the human condition and is not the exclusive province of any single race, religion, or nation’ (Berger, 2018: 4), and defining it is a very complex task considering that the course of the world’s history has repeatedly changed as a result of extremist thinking and extremist violence (Berger, 2018: 22). People with extremist mindsets share a dualistic worldview, the ‘us versus them’ mindset, where the ‘us’ is seen as being good or right and at risk from the ‘them’ (Borum, 2010: 576). Their cognitive style is ‘absolutistic and dogmatic, usually expressed in black and white’ (Trip et al., 2019b: 2).

Other researchers of extremism have conceptualized it as a dimension that exists in the general population, demonstrating that ordinary people have a natural tendency toward extremist thinking: many ordinary individuals who are not members of any extremist organization do, to some degree, endorse extremist ideological beliefs (Saucier et al., 2009; Stankov et al., 2010). In his metaphor of the Staircase to Terrorism, Moghaddam (2005) talks of the millions of people found at the ground floor of the staircase (the pre-radicalization stage): these are ordinary disgruntled people who perceive injustice and feel relatively deprived; of these, some will climb to the first floor of the staircase searching for solutions (achieve greater justice). But if unsuccessful, they are the ones who keep climbing the staircase until they reach the (fifth) floor, the stage of no return, of total commitment to the call for justice.

Constituents of the extremist mindset have been documented in the research to include (1) a fundamentally inflated perception of grievances and sense of alienation resulting from perceived victimization, injustice, humiliation, marginalization, rejection, and exclusion; (2) a strong feeling of connectedness with the in-group for security, certainty, purpose, and legitimization of the anger and hatred toward the out-group; (3) an inflated sense of group-induced self-esteem turning into a feeling of superiority over others; (4) a perception of the other as a threat and persecutor; and (5) a sense of moral responsibility for violent action, or for supporting it (Doosje et al., 2016; Knight et al., 2022; Kruglanski et al., 2014; Saucier et al., 2009; Stankov et al., 2010; Trip et al., 2019a, 2019b; Victoroff, 2005).

Convergences in the conceptual constituents of the prejudiced and extremist mindsets

Based on the above overview, we present the most salient convergences between the prejudiced and extremist mindsets.

Moral disengagement

Both mindsets embed the violation of fairness and justice: Killen et al. (2018: 2) define prejudice as a ‘violation of fundamental moral principles regarding the fair and just treatment of others’. Such violation is an example of what Bandura postulated as moral disengagement in the sense that engagement in harmful behavior requires disengagement from moral self-sanctions against harmful behavior against others. By using disengagement processes, the individual redefines harmful conduct as honorable. In the context of racist/ethnic bullying in schools, moral disengagement mediates the relation between ethnic prejudice (attitudes) and ethnic harassment and bullying (behavior) by making the harassment and the bullying appear legitimate (Iannello et al., 2021). At the adult level, there is substantial empirical evidence supporting the link between moral disengagement and support for political extremism (Nivette et al., 2017). Our world today is witnessing a resurgent climate of nationalism, racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia which has infiltrated schools in many countries, increasing the risk of bullying and victimization among racial, ethnic, and/or religious minority youth (Sapouna et al., 2022).

Moral disengagement is blatant in the eliminationist narrative of people with an extremist mindset; according to Tileaga (2014: 5), extremist people are people who ‘choose mediocrity over humanity’, who choose to exacerbate their direct and unambiguous intolerance instead of showing more commitment to human rights. Blanco et al. (2020) say that moral disengagement mechanisms are activated in the arguments used by extremists to justify and morally legitimize their indulging in cruelty and violence against others who do not share their views, and to minimize their responsibility in the injurious consequences of their acts. Such mechanisms cancel any form of moral control and self-regulation that opposes the carrying out of cruelty and extreme violence.

Dehumanization of the other

Dehumanization, one of the key components of extremism (Blanco et al., 2020; Kteily et al., 2015; Saucier et al., 2009; Tileaga, 2014; Wilde et al., 2014), is a form of moral disengagement. Dehumanization can be operationalized as ‘the attribution of fewer human traits, emotions, and experiences to others (other groups) than oneself (one’s ingroup)’ (Kteily et al., 2015: 2), a very potent perception of the other that legitimizes interpersonal and intergroup aggression. Dehumanization of the other is not restricted to adults; in childhood, it takes the form of bullying perpetrated by some children against more vulnerable, different others. Many children all over the world regularly face exclusion from peer groups due to negative stereotypes and prejudice that they themselves hold and perpetuate in their peer interactions (Cooley et al., 2016). The roots of adult forms of exclusion are well documented in childhood and adolescence, and are shown to yield negative outcomes for children’s development, such as problematic peer relationships and psychological maladjustment; moreover, it is predicted that the perpetrators of exclusion will continue to perpetuate exclusion practices in their adult lives (Abrams and Killen, 2014).

In adolescence where belonging to a clique is a strong element of youth culture, social exclusion is obvious in extreme right-wing or left-wing youth cliques that define themselves in opposition to their ideological ‘rivals’ (Verkuyten, 2021). It has been shown that clique membership is associated with an increase in violent behaviors: as peers organize into small, close-knit groups, mechanisms such as group think and in-group favoritism and out-group bias set in, producing increasingly extreme behaviors among group members (Jensen et al., 2016). In a large number of American schools today, ‘a disturbing uptick in incidents involving swastikas, derogatory language, Nazi salutes, and Confederate flags’ is noted (Costello and Dillard, 2019: 4). It is also worth noting that despite the fact that today’s youth seem to hold less prejudice than older generations toward certain social groups that were traditionally marginalized (sexual minorities, for example), they are less tolerant of immigrants, and such prejudice against immigrants and ethnic minorities may provide critical insights into the development of their future political orientations (Crocetti et al., 2021). Costello and Hodson (2014) wonder why the research on children’s prejudice does not incorporate out-group dehumanization (as in attributing few uniquely human motions and traits to the out-group compared to one’s in-group) as a key predictor of prejudice among adults.

Categorization

‘The process of categorizing someone as a category member transforms how we view them, bringing our perceptions and expectations in line with our prototype of the category’ (Hogg, 2014: 339). Social identity theorists describe the extremist mindset as characterized by a tendency to categorize the world into two poles in an inflexible manner where out-group members are treated as undifferentiated items in a unified social category (Tajfel, 1982). Borum’s (2014) description of the extremist mindset focuses on dualistic thinking – a tendency to form absolutist ideas about how people and events fall into one category or the other.

Similarly, the prejudiced mindset is characterized by feelings of in-group favoritism strengthened by hostility toward out-groups, where the ‘familiar is preferred and the alien is regarded as inferior, less good’ (Allport, 1954: 42). Strong identification with and loyalty to a group is a powerful source of identity; however, it also entails putting down other groups, it encourages the perception of exaggerations of group differences, and eventually leads to conflict between groups (Korostelina, 2008). Stereotypes are an important manifestation of prejudiced thinking and stem from the same categorization process activated by extremists in adulthood.

Rigidity of thinking

One of the core characteristics of the prejudiced mind is its rigidity, inflexibility, and intolerance of ambiguity. Basing their research on the hypothesis that ideological rigidity is rooted in mental rigidity, Zmigrod et al. (2019) present evidence that objectively assessed cognitive inflexibility does indeed predict extremist attitudes. Furthermore, they demonstrated that participants’ cognitive rigidity (as per their performance on cognitive tasks) was specifically implicated as a cognitive antecedent of their extremist attitudes.

Studies of prejudice in children emphasize children’s essentialist thinking characterized by immutability, an important factor in the emergence of children’s racial and ethnic stereotypes (Pauker et al., 2010); young children can only see the world in bipolar terms (Rutland, 1999); studies describe the rigidity of children’s thinking in the early years, before they master, toward the end of Piaget’s concrete operational stage, the reciprocity, reversibility, and conservation principles and the ability to take other people’s perspectives, thus becoming less egocentric and showing more cognitive flexibility. In those early years of development, and in the context of racial prejudice, for example, children’s unsophisticated pre-operational thinking about their social world and their attitudes and behaviors toward minority others are largely affected, if not prescribed, by the social knowledge they have acquired from their environment, a relatively dichotomized positive-white negative-black knowledge based on racial stereotypes that seem to dictate, in a rigid way, their attitudes and behaviors toward the out-group (Aboud, 2003; Augoustinos and Rosewarne, 2001; Enesco et al., 2005).

Feelings of superiority

Both prejudiced and extremist people evaluate members of one’s own group more favorably than members of the out-group. Allport (1954), and all the studies that we examined above, focused on in-group favoritism as a key requisite for childhood prejudice. Aboud (2003), however, makes the distinction between in-group favoritism, a natural phenomenon in the construction of one’s social identity, and in-group superiority, also called moral superiority or egocentrism (in later years, referred to as sociocentrism by Piaget). In-group superiority stems from the process of social comparison, another natural phenomenon during social identity formation, and is described as a type of fixation on one’s group perspective, namely that one’s in-group perspective is the only right perspective and that other groups’ perspectives are wrong. Interestingly, in the case of very young children, there does not seem to be a moral tone to such comparisons whereby the child’s egocentrism may lead them to infer that out-groupers are wrong but they are not necessarily bad people; here, the process of comparison will affect the choices children make as to whom to play with, or work with, or talk to, and their preferences will obviously be for in-groupers while out-groupers will be less likely to receive positive recognition or attention. In that sense, children of the out-group suffer more from such comparisons than from outright blatant hostility (Aboud, 2003: 58).

The Social Dominance Orientation construct has also been strongly and consistently associated with prejudiced and ethnocentric attitudes toward minority out-groups: the construct refers to an attitudinal orientation toward intergroup relations reflecting one’s preference that relations with minority out-groupers remain hierarchical and one’s desire for the dominance and superiority of one’s in-group over such out-groups (Duckitt and Sibley, 2007). Furthermore, in-group superiority has been described in psychoanalytical terms as a form of collective narcissism which provides its members with a sense of being distinguished (Falk, 2004).

Preference of one’s in-group is also one of the fundamental components of extremist thinking in adulthood, and is commonly referred to, by researchers in extremism, as feelings of supremacy (Saucier et al., 2009; Stankov et al., 2010; Trip et al., 2019a). Prominent theories in social psychology (SIT, self-categorization theory, self-affirmation theory) have posited that thinking and acting collectively in terms of ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ restores a sense of control over one’s environment (Jonas et al., 2014). Identifying oneself as a member of a social group has an empowering effect in that it increases one’s sense of personal power and significance (Kruglanski et al., 2014). In their analysis of the narratives of several extremist organizations of different historical eras and different geographical locations, Saucier et al. (2009) and Stankov et al. (2010) were able to delineate a set of recurrent themes that were present in all narratives, the most salient of which is the feeling of superiority over the ‘enemy’: the extremist’s expression of their superiority over others is discussed as an expression of rivalry that aims at preserving one’s in-group sovereignty, strength, and supremacy. Such extremist narratives usually include themes such as glorification of one’s past or the possession of supernatural forces that will guarantee the victory of the in-group over the out-group.

Determinants of the prejudiced mindset

In addition to the child’s limited cognitive abilities, a number of motivational factors may contribute toward racial preferences becoming full-fledged racial attitudes, the most important of which is a salient prejudice norm in the child’s own environment (Abrams et al., 2003, 2007; Nesdale et al., 2005; Pauker et al., 2010). When such a norm is embedded in the child’s in-group, children are very reluctant to violate it because (1) they do not yet have the needed cognitive flexibility to question their own in-group, and (2) children place critical importance on being accepted and on belonging to a social group. In-group prejudice norms enhance children’s preparedness to engage in direct aggression (name calling, taking things from another, hitting, pushing, or teasing) and/or indirect aggression (ignoring, gossiping about, deceiving, rejecting, ostracizing) toward other children (Nipedal et al., 2010).

Most studies in children’s racial prejudice have focused on the role of parents as a socializing agent. Sinclair et al. (2005) examined Allport’s hypothesis that children’s identification with their parents moderates the intergenerational transmission of prejudice. They found a great correspondence between parental prejudice and children’s prejudice, especially among children who were highly identified with their parents as opposed to those who were not.

Ethnic biases are clear among very young children and point to the very important role played by, on the one hand, the child’s cognitive processes and, on the other hand, the interaction between children and their physical and social environment. In early years, acquired stereotypes (from significant adults) are used as ‘fixed models’ of knowledge which aid in the representation of the world and make social reality more understandable (Pirchio et al., 2017: 75). There is substantial research (Barrett and Oppenheimer, 2011; Brewer, 2001; Cameron et al., 2001; Miklikowska, 2016; Pirchio et al., 2017) discussing the various influences of prejudiced parents over their children: direct influences include their overt discourse and actions while indirect influences range from where the family lives, where they go on holiday, which school their children attend (including the school curriculum, the textbooks, the teachers, and the peers), to the goods parents buy for the family and the control they have over their children’s consumption of Internet resources and social media.

In addition to the role of parents, the school has been much researched as a potential influence on the development of racial and ethnic prejudice in children: the school culture, the school curriculum, the teachers, the peers can all provide a great deal of either explicit or implicit material for prejudiced thinking. Even after the desegregation of American schools, providing the opportunity for inter-racial contact did not lead to the expected improvement in inter-racial relations (Levy et al., 2010); an old study by Rutland (1999) clearly revealed the influence of school textbooks and the history school curriculum on the out-group bias of British students toward Germans but not toward other nationalities. The author notes that such prejudice may stem from collective memories of Britain’s relation to Germany during the First and Second World Wars, and negative unsympathetic images of the German ‘enemy’ in textbooks, television programs, and even in children’s comic books (Rutland, 1999: 66). Today, in the 21st century, schools, which are supposed to be a safe haven for children’s optimal development, are still challenged by the mushrooming of racist and ethnocentric movements against minority students (Iannello et al., 2021; Sapouna et al., 2022; Xu et al., 2020).

Determinants of the extremist mindset

The extremist mindset is believed to be the product of a complex interplay of psychological and socialization processes. Nivette et al. (2017) use the General Strain Theory to elucidate the social-psychological mechanisms that underlie the development of extremist attitudes and the conditions under which effects of strain may be buffered or amplified. In their analysis, (1) prevention from achieving one’s goals through perceived unjust or inequitable relations and interactions with others, (2) the removal of positively valued stimuli (loss of a parent, a romantic partner, or employment), and (3) the presence of noxious stimuli such as childhood adversities including abuse and negative experiences with parents and peers, and later with police and employers all produce anger and frustration which demand corrective action such as injuring, damaging, or seeking revenge on the perceived sources of the strain. Childhood adversities have been emphasized in the developmental approach to the study of extremism; Simi et al. (2016) proposed a risk factor model of violent extremism to highlight how childhood adversities and subsequent adolescent misconduct problems increase an individual’s susceptibility to extremism.

Another determinant of extremism that is not included in the General Strain Theory has to do with more existential matters and is well elucidated in Terror Management Theory (TMT), which states that the group gives a sense of security and a meaning to one’s existence, increases one’s self-esteem and decreases the level of one’s fear of annihilation (symbolic death). The increase in existential feelings of security and the sense of a symbolic immortality leads to an increase in one’s loyalty to one’s membership to the group and feelings of superiority over other groups; this is exacerbated by the stock of accumulated stereotypes about the others (Rosenblatt et al., 1989; Steinman & Updegraff, 2015; Vail et al., 2010).

Recently, Beelmann (2020) proposed a comprehensive theoretical model based on a systematic integration of previous theories of extremism and their empirical findings. Beelmann delineated an ontogenetic perspective of extremism, starting the first two decades of life. He posited four central conditions, or proximal processes, for radicalization and extremism to develop: identity problems, prejudice, political or religious ideologies, and antisocial attitudes and behavior. Actual societal, social, or individual conflicts come to trigger these processes and intensify them, thus increasing the likelihood of extremism in both attitudes (non-violent extremism) and behavior (violent/militant extremism).

Convergences in the determinants of the prejudiced and extremist mindsets

Both extremism and prejudice have been addressed in the literature through the theoretical lens of SIT. This theory has been particularly useful in understanding the making of the extremist mindset. It is important, however, to note that SIT is not a theory of extremism: it is a theory of the relationship between the individual and the group and of how membership in a group influences the individual’s perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors. Neither is SIT a developmental theory, yet SIT has been extensively used to explain how extremism emerges and develops. By the same token, SIT, which is not a theory of prejudice, has been extremely valuable for the understanding of intergroup prejudice and discrimination (Strindberg, 2020).

Extremism does not simply happen ad hoc or without any antecedents at some point in youth or adult development (Beelmann, 2020: 4). The unfolding of extremist attitudes and behavior necessitates ontogenetic cognitive and social-developmental conditions which represent important risk factors. Similarly, in the literature on children prejudice, psychologists consider that out-group prejudice arises from the interaction between personal developmental changes and surrounding social factors such as the influence of prejudiced parents, discriminatory practices in the school, in one’s religious group, depictions of prejudiced thinking and behavior in books, television material and other media channels children and adolescents are exposed to, as well as the existence of conflict with an enemy state (Brewer, 2001; Cameron et al., 2001).

Allport (1954), who clearly considered genocide as an extreme form of prejudice, elucidates the ‘stepwise progression from verbal aggression to violence, from rumor to riot, from gossip to genocide’ (p. 57). Prerequisite to such a stepwise progression is the long period of categorical prejudgment of the out-group, loaded with stereotypes, where the ability to think about members of the out-group as individuals is lost. A second prerequisite is the long period of complaints against the out-group, loaded with the element of blaming. A third prerequisite is the period of perceived discrimination affected by concrete grievances as in economic deprivation, low-status restrictions, and a growing fear of unemployment. At that point, Allport says, the in-group has grown tired of putting up with unemployment, humiliation, and alienation; people become irrational and reach the stage of explosion. This is the stage where the discontented people formally join organized movements or informally join the mobs where they derive courage and support and feel that their wrath is socially sanctioned and their violence justified. At the final step of this progression, when violence actually breaks out, the phenomenon of ‘social facilitation’ is activated whereby individual anger is augmented and individual inhibitions are lessened by the collective frenzy (Allport, 1954: 57–58).

There is a striking similarity between Allport’s stepwise model and the metaphor of the Staircase to Terrorism proposed by Moghaddam (2005) to explain how an ordinary person turns into an extremist person. According to Moghaddam’s model, the first step of the staircase toward the radicalization of youth and adults into extremists and later into terrorists is the perception of injustice and the feeling of deprivation; at the child level, and using Allport’s stepwise progression model, such perceptions and feelings coincide with the first three prerequisites where prejudiced parents, a prejudiced school culture, prejudiced peers and biased media play a significant role in crystallizing the child’s own attitudes toward the out-group(s).

The second step in Moghaddam’s model involves seeking solutions to fight the perceived injustice; at the adult level, the solution is in the form of seeking justice and equity in various ways; when such efforts are blocked, as they usually are, blaming others for one’s detrimental conditions seems to be the only available mechanism, in addition to the displacement of one’s aggression. In the case of children who are influenced by continuous parental grievances and the resulting frustrations, aggression is displaced onto more vulnerable others available in the school, as in the acts of bullying.

The third step in Moghaddam’s radicalization model involves moral engagement where the adult justifies all actions as sacrifice toward a just goal and becomes morally committed to the ideology. At the child level, according to Brewer (2001), derogation of the out-group is sanctioned when there is direct motivation to do so (as in the presence of antagonism or where the very existence of the out-group is seen as threat to the in-group), and in countries at war, this is paralleled with an age-increase of feelings of pride and favoritism toward the motherland (the in-group) (Barrett and Oppenheimer, 2011; Ioannou and Kassianos, 2018; Niwa et al., 2016).

The last two steps in Moghaddam’s model describe the full consolidation of a powerful categorical us-versus-them view of the world where in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination are reinforced to a point of no return. For Moghaddam, this is the stage where the commitment of the radicalized individual to the ‘cause’ is unshakeable: the individual is now ready to act. This stage coincides with Allport’s concluding step where prejudiced attitudes and beliefs are now crystallized into blatant acts of discrimination and violence perpetrated against the out-group.

Exploring this progression, whether in Allport’s or Moghaddam’s terms, should be an eye-opener to all concerned with the prevention of extremism; researchers warn that inter-ethnic stereotyping and prejudice, if not properly addressed at an early age, can further develop into conflict-promoting narratives and intergroup violence, two common aspects of the extremist mindset (Berger et al., 2018). It is important to note, however, that Moghaddam’s model, although an important contribution to the understanding of the development of terrorism though the proposal of several psychological theories (relative deprivation theory, Bandura’s self-efficacy and moral engagement models, rational choice theory, displacement of aggression theory, TMT) and processes (dehumanization, social categorization, and indoctrination), has been criticized for the lack of qualitative and quantitative evidence for (1) the relationship between such processes and terrorism and (2) the transition between the steps of Moghaddam’s staircase, thus questioning the suitability of the staircase metaphor (Lygre et al., 2011).

Discussion and recommendations

We begin our discussion by quoting Hogg and Abrams (1998) who wrote, ‘Genocide is the ultimate expression of prejudice and discrimination’ (p. 1). Rutland and Killen (2015) say that ‘it is of paramount importance to determine how best to reduce prejudice early in development [. . .] because by adulthood, prejudice is deeply entrenched and difficult to change’ (p. 122). Childhood thus is a period during which deeply rooted prejudices can be avoided, challenged, or changed due to the fact that children have not laid down strong associations and memory traces and that they may be able ‘to learn and unlearn more readily than adults’ (Abrams, 2010: 74).

Our review has shown that the same situational factors discussed in the context of the emergence of prejudice in childhood (parental prejudices, discriminatory practices in the school, in one’s religious group, in one’s peer group, and depictions of prejudiced thinking and behavior in the media channels to which children are exposed) have been unmistakably associated with the rise and development of extremist thinking and extremist behavior in adults (Knight et al., 2022). The points of convergence between the prejudiced and the extremist mindsets were discussed in terms of the conceptual constituents of each and their determinants. This discussion leads us to hypothesize that the prejudiced mindset in childhood may be a potential marker for the development of the extremist mindset in late adolescence and adulthood.

To date, no empirical studies have directly tackled the relationship between the two mindsets, although terminologies used in most of the scales used to measure extremism overlap with terminologies related to prejudice, racism, ethnocentrism, and so on. There has been some research, case studies using interviews and retrospective insight, on extremist individuals who would reflect on their childhood experiences with an emphasis on childhood adversities, but such research, despite its invaluable importance, does not serve as objective and reliable ground to further elaborate on any developmental pattern between prejudice and extremism. Testing for a developmental relationship between prejudice in childhood and extremism in adulthood requires a sophisticated longitudinal design which has not to date been initiated.

Today, the socio-ethnic fabric of schools is becoming more and more diversified; it is thus imperative that schools realize the importance of their role as a safe haven for children and youth where moderate views about world issues should be bred, values of tolerance, empathy and inclusion consolidated, and models of compassion, civility, and upstanding for what is right unequivocally recommended and encouraged.

It is important to keep in mind that, despite the many similarities between prejudiced thinking and the extremist mindset, there is a major developmental milestone that needs to be addressed, namely the emergence of morality in children’s thinking. Developmentally, children’s prejudice has been shown to decline starting the age of 8 years, which corresponds with the child’s entrance into Piaget’s concrete operational stage (Aboud, 2005; Augoustinos and Rosewarne, 2001; Fitzroy and Rutland, 2010; Raabe and Beelmann, 2011). This coincides with the child’s acquisition of the principles of conservation, reciprocity and perspective-taking, and the embracement of a more flexible view of the social world. The decline in prejudiced thinking is understood as a result of (1) the emergence of a new kind of moral values in the 8-year-old, and (2) the child’s awareness of socially desirable and undesirable behaviors as their mental abilities mature (Enesco et al., 2005). Indeed, the research shows that by 6 years of age, children begin to critically evaluate unfair practices, particularly in peer contexts (Killen et al., 2018). This early emergence of moral concerns and children’s ability to give priority to fairness in contexts where prejudicial attitudes (and stereotypes) are present enables children to recognize prejudicial attitudes as wrong and unfair and reject discriminatory and exclusionary practices when they see them.

The emergence of moral thinking is strongly related to the child’s concrete operational thinking (taking the perspective of the other) where understanding others’ mental states (and intentions) becomes important for making moral judgments about others. Without such understanding, children are prone, like adults, to make faulty attributions in explaining others’ behavior (e.g. a negative intention to a well-meaning act). Rigid stereotypical thinking is a core ingredient of such faulty attributions, resulting in the social exclusion of others. Research shows that when stereotypes are salient in the child’s environment and when the child’s environment allows for the expression of prejudice, children have difficulty applying moral principles of fairness (this is very visible in gender-identified activities during the preschool period). Yet, when fairness concerns are made salient and the child’s environment endorses tolerance, children find it easier to apply fairness (Killen et al., 2018).

What is needed today is a reinforcement of social environments that facilitate the development of concerns with fairness, equality, and justice, of what Aboud and Steele (2017) call the ‘optimal windows of social influence’: parental open-mindedness, a diversity-tolerant community, an inclusive school environment, flexibility in peers’ attitudes toward minorities, and non-biased media. These ‘windows’ play a crucial role in childhood when stereotypes (positive and negative) are being crystallized. It has been shown, for example, that the language parents use to refer to other social groups matters for children’s perception and understanding of these groups (Verkuyten, 2021), and that teachers play an important role in buffering out-group prejudice. Thus, when teachers take action against unfair behavior practiced against minority students, this results in less instances of prejudiced behavior in the school and positively impacts students’ intergroup attitudes and well-being (Cooley et al., 2016). Addressing out-group bias in early childhood may serve to prevent the further development of a categorical us-versus-them view of the world in adolescents.

These optimal windows also include evidence-based prejudice reduction intervention programs, such as those promoting interpersonal and intergroup contact (Beelmann & Heinemann, 2014), and strategies for preventing extremism, such as attitudinal inoculation against extremist propaganda and other de-radicalization programs (Van de Weert, 2021). All these programs and strategies include family counseling to strengthen the family as a counterforce against the radicalization of its members, as well as to produce individual cognitive openings for ideological reconsideration. These also include educational strategies that use counter-narratives for raising self-awareness, empowerment, and encouraging critical thinking, participation, and good citizenship. In the context of young children, this would include a wide variety of creative program modalities under the rubric of intergroup contact, such as the enhancement of knowledge about out-groups, training on socio-cognitive skills (empathy, perspective-taking, moral development, social problem-solving), group discussion, roleplaying, and curriculum implementation (Beelmann & Heinemann, 2014; Berger et al., 2018; Dovidio et al., 2011; Miles and Crisp, 2014; Scior, 2011).

What is needed is a resolute engagement of the mechanisms of moral agency where people, children, adolescents, and adults get to recognize that ‘the affirmation of common humanity can bring out the best in others’ (Bandura, 1999: 202). Proactive morality is taking personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions and remaining sensitive to the suffering of others. All those concerned with education, parents, teachers, educational administrators, educational policy makers, and so on should consider the strengthening of moral agency as a curricular priority when they set their educational objectives.

We end our discussion with a reminder from Tajfel, the founder of SIT, that socialization into ‘groupness’ is unavoidable; it has several valuable functions but also some not so valuable side effects that reinforce acute intergroup tensions. Tajfel goes on to say that ‘perhaps those educators in our competitive societies who from the earliest schooling are so keen on “teams” and “team spirit” could give some thought to the operation of these side effects’ (Tajfel, 1970: 102).