Parenting motives and ingroup bias: How adults’ naïve theories shape the expectations of children's intergroup attitudes

The Parental Care and Tenderness Questionnaire (PCAT) is designed to assess participants’ motivation for parenting through 25 items that encompass 5 different factors: liking, protection, caring, tenderness-positive and tenderness-negative. In this regard, a study (N=141) was conducted to explore the link between parental motivations and intergroup attitudes by asking participants to put themselves in the shoes of a 7-year-old White child. Adults performed two race-IATs and then reported their predictions about the most likely attitudes of White children in intergroup contexts (e.g. evaluating how much children would have liked to play with a White child and with a Black child; assigning positive and negative adjectives towards a White Child and a Black Child). The results showed that high scores on the PCAT are associated with more positive attitudes in children in general; despite this, the participants showed an ingroup bias by evaluating the White child more positively. More specifically, an ingroup bias was found to be stronger in younger participants, with high scores on the PCAT and IAT.