Intergroup attitudes in preschool children in conflictual intergroup settings: The case of Romania and Lebanon

Children develop intergroup attitudes within social environments that differ in the status, visibility, and meaning assigned to social groups. Although prior work has examined children's intergroup attitudes in some conflictual settings, research remains limited on how young children respond to group categories in contexts where social boundaries are tied to displacement, exclusion, and unequal status. The present research addresses this gap by examining intergroup preferences among preschool-aged children in two sociopolitically stratified yet understudied contexts: Lebanon and Romania. We investigated how children evaluated peers from their ingroup, a stigmatized outgroup (Syrians in Lebanon, Roma in Romania), and a valued outgroup (French). In both studies, children completed a physical distance task and a friendship choice task. In Study 1 (N = 94, M_age = 4.13 years, SD_age = 0.83 years; 42 girls), children saw distinct photographs for each group that differed in visual features (e.g., skin tone). Children showed a strong preference for the valued outgroup and consistently rejected the stigmatized outgroup across both tasks. These results were observed even among the youngest participants. In Study 2 (N = 87, M_age = 4.98 years, SD_age = 0.82 years; 45 girls), children saw the same set of photographs, and only the group labels (ingroup, stigmatized outgroup, valued outgroup) varied across participants, thereby holding physical appearance constant. When physical appearance was held constant, the preference for the valued outgroup disappeared. Children instead favored the ingroup and continued to reject the stigmatized outgroup, indicating that labeling alone was sufficient to elicit exclusion. These findings underscore the robustness of early bias against stigmatized groups, the sensitivity of young children to symbolic group labels, and the powerful role of both visual and social cues. They support the Integrative Developmental-Contextual Theory and highlight the need for early, context-sensitive interventions.