Does disgust-eliciting propaganda shape children's attitudes toward novel immigrant groups?

Abstract

Propaganda frequently leverages themes of dirtiness and disease to foster negative attitudes toward marginalized social groups. Although history suggests that this tactic is highly successful, empirical evidence is required to evaluate propaganda's potential efficacy. Inspired by previous evidence that children rapidly form attitudes about social groups, we conducted an exploratory investigation into whether 5- to 9-year-olds' (N = 48) judgments of novel foreign groups could be swayed by visually depicting one of these groups as disgusting in poster-sized illustrations. Across a wide battery of tasks, there was no clear indication that children readily internalize messages from propaganda in evaluating members of novel social groups. This finding held regardless of the type of disgustingness that was depicted in the propaganda, and generalized across the age range we investigated. Overall, our results are encouraging in a practical sense, suggesting that children are not easily swayed by negative misrepresentations of immigrants in propaganda.

Keywords: Cleanliness; Dirtiness; Disgust; Immigration; Propaganda; Social bias.