The Family Transmission of Ethnic Prejudice

Generally speaking, research on the intergenerational transmission of ethnic prejudice is rather scarce. According to current socialisation theories, the transmission is a bidirectional process involving both parents and children as active persons influencing the outcomes. Transmission becomes a negotiation process. In the context of values, it was suggested that children do not imitate their parental values but interpret them in innovative ways. During adolescence, asymmetrical constellations of earlier periods are renegotiated and relationships outside the family become more important. Adolescents start considering diverse categories and become quite active in the transmission process (Zagrean et al., 2022).

Studies concerning the transmission of ethnic prejudice have unfortunately focused almost exclusively on childhood, thus leaving the adolescence phase under-investigated (Crocetti et al. 2021). Around the age of seven to eight, children begin to consolidate a preference for their ethnicity and progressively reach an identification with their ethnic ingroup. The research involving parents and pre-school- and school-age children (up to 12 years) showed mixed results. Indeed, some of them found a high degree of similarity between the parents’ and the children’s ethnic prejudice (e.g., Epstein and Komorita 1966; Katz 2003), while others reported only a moderate or low similarity (...). Castelli et al. (2009), in their study involving Italian parents and biological three- to six-year-old children, found that the parents’ explicit and implicit negative attitudes1 towards immigrants predicted those of their children, but only in the case of the mothers.

In their systematic review of research articles (four databases: Ebsco, Scopus, PubMed, Web of Science), a study carried out in 2021, Zagrean et al. (2022) addressed the following research questions:

(a) To what extent is there a vertical (between parents and children) and horizontal (between siblings) transmission of ethnic prejudice within the family?
(b) Is the family transmission of ethnic prejudice unidirectional (from parents to children) or bidirectional (between parents and children)?
(c) Which individual and/or relational variables influence the transmission of ethnic prejudice within the family?
(d) Can adolescents’ intergroup contact experiences affect the family influence on adolescents’ ethnic prejudice?

The findings show a moderate bidirectional transmission of ethnic prejudice between parents and adolescents which was influenced by variables such as the adolescents' age, their birth order, their and their parents' gender, the parents' income and the quality of the family relationship (in terms of warmth, closeness, parenting style). The parents' influence and the adolescents' ethnic prejudice were reduced by the adolescents' positive (and frequent) contacts with peers of different ethnicities.

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- Zagrean, I., Barni, D. Russo, C. & Danioni, F. (2022). The Family Transmission of Ethnic Prejudice: A Systematic Review of Research Articles with Adolescents. Social Sciences, 11(6), link
- photograph by Joseph Szabo (1978) via