The Psychology of Tolerance: Conception and Development
Author: Witenberg, Rivka T.
Date: 2019-04-12T07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Psychology; Developmental; General; Philosophy; Ethics & Moral Philosophy; Cognitive Psychology & Cognition; Social Psychology; Social Science; Ethnic Studies; Child; Psychedelic Library
Description: This book offers a new standpoint to understanding tolerance to human diversity by approaching it from the perspectives of cognitive, developmental and prosocial psychology. Emphasising the positive aspects of social perception and behaviour, it invites readers to re-consider ‘tolerance’ not simply as the opposite of prejudice, but as something that can in fact coexist with prejudice and intolerance. Drawing on original empirical research conducted with children, adolescents and young adults, the book maps the response patterns for tolerant judgement and justification, including psycho-develop
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Rivka T. Witenberg

The Psychology of ToleranceConception and Development

Rivka T. Witenberg

Independent Researcher, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2192-8363e-ISSN 2192-8371

SpringerBriefs in Psychology

ISBN 978-981-13-3788-8e-ISBN 978-981-13-3789-5
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3789-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965896

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

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My appreciation goes to my father Rabbi Ze’ev Tapoohi (Wolf Yablonovich) who taught me that we are all equal and to my mother Nechama Hirschberg Tapoohi who imparted the love of books and words. This book is dedicated to them and Ron Witenberg who always supported me in my commitment to this work.

That which is loathsome to you, do not do to your fellow.

Rabbi Hillel Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a

Mutual tolerance is a necessity for all time and for all races.

Mahatma Gandhi

How do we create a harmonious society out of so many kinds of people? The key is tolerance—the one value that is indispensable in creating community.

Barbara Jordan, American lawyer, educator and politician who was a leader of the Civil Rights movement

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge and thank colleagues, research assistants and students who were involved in the research presented in this book. In particular, I would like to mention Prof. Trang Thomas in Australia and Prof. Yaacov Iram and Dr. Rachel Gali Cinamon in Israel for their involvement and cooperation. I would also like to acknowledge past students’ involvement in the research. I am grateful to Prof. Mary Ainley for reviewing the chapter on Definitions and Method and Dr. Ninawa Butrus for commenting on several of the chapters. I am also thankful to the schools and their students who allowed us to conduct the research in spite of possible disruption and all the older participants in the studies undertaken.

Importantly, I would also like to acknowledge that some of the research findings and the conceptual development presented in this book, particularly in regard to the psychological studies, have appeared previously in referred journals, conference presentations and in monographs.

This research was supported by the following research funding bodies: Commonwealth Research Grant, Centre for Education for Human Values and Tolerance, Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv, Israel; Large Australian Research Council Grant (SPIRT) in partnership with the Australian Multicultural Foundation, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the University of Melbourne; The University of Melbourne Collaborative research Grant and The Australian Catholic University research grants.

I would also like to thank family and friends who have been both positive and encouraging during the time of writing this book.

Introduction

Overview: Why Tolerance and What Is It?

Tolerance is only necessary when difference or diversity is present because it is only when we confront diversity that our acceptance of others is truly tested (Vogt, 1997). As an outcome of changing geo-political realities, we live in a complex world that is becoming increasingly diverse but not necessarily always harmonious. Multinational migration of either ethnic workers or refugees, whether for economic or political reasons, is becoming more and more prevalent resulting in a world were monocultural societies are virtually extinct today. Considering current events in the world such as the recent inflow of millions of migrants and refugees to Europe from the Middle-East and Africa, which unfortunately can and does create disharmony and intolerance. Research shows that places where economic conditions are less affluent and the influx of migrants is large, negative feelings about foreigners emerge more readily, in contrast to more wealthy countries. Similarly, in places where there is a greater support for right-wing parties, negative feelings about migrants and refugees are more pronounced (Semyonov, Raijman, & Gorodzeisky, 2006). History has shown how intolerance to others who are different can result in calamitous outcomes such as the Shoah (the Holocaust), Srebrenica or the Rwanda massacres.

While these are extreme examples, they point to the importance for the understanding of tolerance and acceptance as applied to human diversity generally, as well as an important research goal both theoretically and practically. Such insight may help to shape the debate and practice about policies related to productive diversity in a multicultural environment and provide a basis for the design of community and school-based education programs (Thomas, 1998). Evaluations of education and/or intervention programs aimed at reducing prejudice have yielded mixed results. Promoting tolerance maybe an alternative route to more harmonious living between diverse people.

Further, a better understanding of psychological factors influencing tolerance and acceptance of others different in race, [1] colour, creed and nationality has never been more important in a world where homogeneous societies are becoming increasingly rare. Tolerance and acceptance of others different from us focuses on the positive aspects of social perceptions and behaviours and is arguably pro-social and moral in nature (Forst, 2003; Oberdiek, 2001; Witenberg, 2007).

However, there has been a tendency for the psychological research about tolerance to confound prejudice and tolerance which are mostly investigated as if they were the opposite of each other. That is, if a person does not express intolerance in a particular situation then she or he are regarded as being tolerant generally. My argument is that tolerance and prejudice are two conceptually different processes which the research presented in this book confirms. In fact, the absence of expressions of prejudice does not automatically entail tolerance. On the basis of my research, I have reached the following conclusion.

That is, tolerance is a construct or concept in its own right which is not the opposite of prejudice because we can be tolerant and prejudiced at the same time. In other words, tolerance and prejudice coexist. Specifically, I argue that tolerance and prejudice are two different constructs which are mutually exclusive of each other. This becomes apparent when we think about the simple fact that people can be tolerant and prejudiced at the same time. We all know people who can be very tolerant and accepting about one group of people but hatefully intolerant about another group of people.

Consequently, tolerance examined as a separate construct may have unique implications for the better understanding of tolerance and acceptance in its own right rather than the opposite of prejudice. It also has important implications for educational outcomes and social policy. Further, how tolerance is defined has important implications for how it is characterised and measured (Butrus & Witenberg, 2015; Witenberg, 2007).

In the beginning of my research about tolerance around 2000, with the exception of some studies in political tolerance (Helwig, 1995, 1998; Neff & Helwig, 2002; Wainryb, Shaw, & Maianu, 1998), little data was available that examined tolerance as a concept in its own right from a psychological perspective using a cognitive developmental approach to examine how tolerance is conceptualised. More specifically, the approach I took was to explore how children, younger and older adolescents and young adults reasoned about tolerance focusing on the kind of judgements and justifications they made. In other words, how they conceptualised tolerance. This gave us an insight about tolerance as a concept in its own right rather than just simply the opposite of prejudice.

Surprisingly, the word “tolerance” itself was rarely used in general discourse, in the media or appealed to by public figures and politicians. In spite of the fact that in 1995 the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared the 16th of November as the annual day of tolerance to highlight human rights and dignity as expressed through tolerance and peaceful coexistence. However, in more recent times, tolerance is discussed more often and mentioned in the media regularly (e.g., Furedi, 2011; Porter Fantini, 2017; Witenberg, 2014, 2015) and appealed to on a regular basis by politicians, community leaders and others across the world dealing with intergroup relationships. This could be a reflection of the turbulent times we live in. Sweden is a good example of how the use of the idea of tolerance has become part of the vocabulary of Swedish society. Reviews of the Swedish press shows how the use has increased dramatically from 1990 were the term was used 108 times in comparison to 5006 times in 2016. The Swedish internet also shows such a dramatic change with references to tolerance used 27 times in 2000 to 7178 in 2016. In Denmark and within the European Union tolerance has also gained prominence in political debate (Lundberg, 2017). In Australia, the concept of tolerance now occurs regularly in social and political discourse. Today we often hear world and community leaders calling for tolerance and cooperation between nations and between disparate groups. This is because, “A tolerant society is an open, pluralistic, and democratic society, which respects civil liberties and human rights” (Kurtz, 1994, p. 99) and central to harmonious intergroup living and cooperation between people (Grayling, 2010).

The Book

The main focus in this book is to describe what the concept of tolerance is, at least from a psychological perspective or more specifically how young children, younger and older adolescents and young adults reason, make judgements and justify their tolerance stance. My aim was to find some answers for the following questions. What is tolerance and how do we define it? Why is it important? What do we know about it? Is it sufficient not to act with intolerance? How do we protect and advance it? This book aims to answer some of these questions. The research presented in this book explores the formation of tolerance as a concept in its own right mainly by young children, younger and older adolescents and young adults. It describes their understanding about tolerance through their thoughts and beliefs as well as the developmental trajectory from childhood to early adulthood. The book relies greatly on the psychological data I collected with colleagues and students to better understand the formation of tolerance in its own right.

However, to better understand what the concept of tolerance is, we need to consider definitional issues from both philosophical and psychological perspectives. While prejudice “reflects an unfavourable judgement towards a particular group” and discrimination “involves behaving differently, usually unfairly, toward the members of a group” (Robinson, Witenberg, & Sanson, 2001, p. 75), tolerance is often viewed as contentious in nature and is more difficult to define. Chapter 1 deals with the often complex, paradoxical and controversial nature of tolerance and the different definitions that compete with each other. Tolerance has been characterised in different ways ranging from forbearance or “putting up with” to the full or whole-hearted acceptance of others who are different (e.g., Forst, 2003; Oberdiek, 2001). Forbearance is the classical definition of tolerance from a philosophical perspective and is still adopted by many philosophers (e.g., Nehushtan, 2007). It is a definition most commonly used by many investigators in the social sciences as recent research shows (e.g., Arensmeier, 2017). In her study Arensmeiern found that most of the participants aged between 17 and 18 years defined tolerance as “Acceptance for what is not liked” (Arensmeier, 2017, p. 190). It is also an accepted definition in research about tolerance in the case of political tolerance (e.g., Marcus, Sullivan, Thiess-Morse, & Stevens, 2005). However, putting up with something which is disliked or abhorred does not necessarily meet a contemporary definition of tolerance which is more about acceptance of difference as long as such beliefs and practices do not cause harm to others (Hare, 1981; Oberdiek, 2001; Vogt, 1997). This has implication for education.

What is often overlooked is that full acceptance too has its limitation. This is because tolerance is paradoxical in nature in that we can be intolerant to tolerance. Limits of tolerance is one of the difficulties in dealing with it in both theory and practice. For example, we are intolerant to tolerance when we reject acts, such as child marriages where a relationship between a child and an adult is harmful to the child. In spite of accepted cultural practices we need to reflect on the paradoxical nature of tolerance in such cases where others are harmed. Tolerance in such cases cannot be impartial where others are denigrated or harmed. It is an ethical and moral principle and the assumption that any form of abuse or restriction of individual civil and human rights is acceptable, is a misunderstanding of the very nature of tolerance.

An important aspect of tolerance is that it must be reflective in nature. How individuals make judgements and justify their stance in embracing tolerance is an important aspect in understanding how tolerance emerges and develops. How tolerance to human diversity is judged and justified are central themes in this book. Both Furedi (2011) and Grayling (2010), argue that tolerance that is unreflected and non-judgmental allows for the imposition of unacceptable cultural and religious beliefs on others.

Therefore, an alternative way to characterise tolerance is to ground it in theories of morality and pro-social behaviour. Linking tolerance with pro-social behaviour, equality, respect and acceptance enables and facilitates the coexistence of conflicting claims of beliefs, values and ideas as long as they fit within schemes of pro-social norms and moral values (Dusche, 2002; Witenberg, 2004, 2007). This allows for a positive approach to examining intergroup relations and the diversity of contemporary societies (Blum, 1999; Vogt, 1997). In placing tolerance within the moral and pro-social domains pertaining to empathy, caring, equality, justice, respect, reason and avoiding harm to others, it should be viewed as positive in nature, rather than “putting up with” something we dislike or even abhor. The research findings presented in this book both affirm and confirm, at least to a point, the proposition that tolerance is both moral and pro-social in nature.

Apart from definitions about tolerance, Chap. 1 also presents the method and measurement relevant to the research about tolerance which was developed in order to examine reasoning, judgements and justifications about tolerance (Witenberg, 2000a, b, 2002a, b). One important aspect of the method is the use of dilemma-like-stories based on real life events which can be resolved with either tolerance or intolerance and adopted from the moral development literature (Colby et al., 1983; Greene, 2003; Haidt, 2013; Kohlberg, 1981, 1984). One of the important aspects of the method is that the participants are not cued or prompted in any way that could have suggested the purpose of the research. The idea of tolerance is never alluded to in any of the studies, nor were definitions of tolerance asked for. Asking for definitions is sometimes used in other research programs (Arensmeier, 2017) which usually taps into the most common understanding of tolerance as forbearance. In contrast, based on statistical analysis described in Chap. 1 , three major underlying beliefs to support a tolerant stance emerged. They were fairness/justice, empathy for the plight of others and the need for reason and logic. At no time were these underlying beliefs solicited from the participants. Rather, the participants generated them spontaneously without any prompting from the researchers. Therein lies the strength of the findings presented in this book.

Chapter 2 discusses some related research that deals with political and belief discrepancy tolerance. These studies move away from assessing lack of prejudice as a measure of tolerance. Instead they examine tolerance with direct questions in some of the studies and with the use of dilemma stories in others (e.g. Helwig, 1998; Neff & Helwig, 2002; Wainryb, Shaw, Langley, Cottam, & Lewis, 2001; Wainryb, Shaw, Laupa, & Smith, 2004). The second part of the chapter summarises some of the research about young children’s understanding of difference. If young children do not recognise difference, tolerance and intolerance becomes meaningless. However, the research indicates that from an early age children do notice differences, not only about racial markers but also about gender differences (e.g. Katz, 2003; Katz & Downey, 2002). Examining how six to seven years old children make judgements about tolerance and intolerance and justify their stance makes sense in the light of these findings.

While theoretical definitions are important, how people conceptualise tolerance is equally important. It is also an area which until recently has been rather under-researched. Chapters 3 and 4 present the findings from studies (Chung-Voon, 2002; Hogan, 2002; Witenberg, 2007) that examined the development of tolerance in young children aged between six and seven. The two chapters summarise the findings about how tolerance is conceptualised through the use of judgments and justification. What emerges from these studies is that young children express high levels of tolerance which is global in nature with justifications based on fairness and occasionally empathy. The young children show early signs of conscious rejections of intolerance. However, what the research also shows is that their responses are global in nature, with a tendency to overlook the contextual information embedded in the different dilemma-like stories. They also reject globally biased beliefs and discriminatory speech and acts. The use of the behavioural dimensions of holding prejudicial beliefs, speaking about them and acting on them incorporated in all the studies, were adopted from Wainryb and her colleagues’ research about belief discrepancy tolerance (Wainryb et al., 1998). The young children’s justifications for all behavioural dimensions of holding prejudicial beliefs, talking about them and acting on them were supported by appeal to beliefs in fairness and occasionally empathy.

Both early and contemporary research in moral development provides strong evidence that fairness and empathy are important factors in moral reasoning and behaviour (Haidt, 2013; Hoffman, 2000, 2014; Kohlberg, 1984; Neale, 2002; Piaget, 1932/1965) and this is also supported by neuropsychological studies (Paxton & Greene, 2010; Singer, 2006). It is therefore not a coincidence that tolerance is supported by fairness and empathy, indicating its relationship to moral thoughts and behaviour.

Chapters 5 and 6 reviews the findings about younger and older adolescents’ and young adults’ understanding of tolerance to human diversity (Neale, 2002; Thomas & Witenberg, 2004; Witenberg, 2002a, b, 2004, 2007; Witenberg & Cinamon, 2006; Witenberg & Mcdowall, 2001). Similarly, to the youngest students, the research examined underlying beliefs through judgements and justification about tolerance towards others different from them. Again, the data showed that overall the participants were highly tolerant. However, age related differences did emerge. While the analysis of the data needs to be interpreted with some caution and further research is required, nevertheless the central idea that emerged from the studies is a conceptual developmental model of tolerance which is based on fairness/justice/equity, empathy and reason/logic and which evolved with age, experience and reasoning capacities. Gender related differences also emerged, in that females more often than males appeal to empathy while males appeal to reason and logic. Younger males between 13 and 15 years of age were found to be the least tolerant. Although the findings about the younger males’ level of tolerance were statistically supported, the difference was small. Once again, the research shows that tolerance is placed within the moral domain with appeal to fairness, empathy and the questioning of illogical and unfounded beliefs. The older participants appeal to reason and logic suggests that tolerance needs to be reflective in nature and indicating moral maturity. In a much more sophisticated manner than the younger students, the older participants reflected on what is acceptable and what is not. With maturity, they were able to understand the importance of the concept of fairness, equity and impartiality as well as the ability to step into someone else’s shoes and understand the plight of others. They were also able to reflect on illogical and discriminatory beliefs, speech and acts. However, unexpectedly, freedom of speech was used to support the right to speak about biased beliefs because “we have free speech in the country”. To place the findings within the broader psychological domain, each of the four chapters also draw on relevant psychological theories and research to explain and place the findings in a broader perspective.

Grounding tolerance in theories of morality allows for an alternative educational approach to promote harmonious intergroup relationships. This idea is developed further in Chap. 7 , which examines educational implications. Generally, programs need to be developed that take into consideration the multifaceted nature of tolerance, the deliberative process underlying it and its relationship to the moral domain.

Finally, this book attempts to bring together the psychology of tolerance. Needless to say, it does not have all the answers to the challenges of what tolerance is and what makes us tolerant. The ideas underlying this book however challenge the notions that tolerance and prejudice are two sides of a coin and that people cannot be tolerant and prejudiced at the same time. It further develops the argument that, unlike prejudice, tolerance is a concept in its own right and can be grounded in theories of pro-social behaviour and moral values which provide a positive approach to examining intergroup relations. A better understanding of factors influencing tolerance to difference and diversity has never been more important in a world where homogeneous societies are becoming increasingly rare. For diverse societies, intolerance, prejudice and discrimination are challenging intergroup relations. Tolerance and acceptance of others (within tolerable limits) is essential for harmonious living.

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Contents

1 Definitions and Method
1

1.1 What is Tolerance: Competing Interpretations and Considerations
1

1.2 Measuring Tolerance
5

1.3 Scoring and Measurement Issues
9

References
12

2 Previous Research About Tolerance
15

2.1 Political and Belief Discrepancy Tolerance
15

2.2 Research About Young Children Understanding of Others Different from Them
19

References
21

3 Tolerance of Six to Seven-Year-Old Children
25

3.1 Previous Research About Young Children: Background to the Research
25

3.2 The Global Nature of Tolerance in Young Children
27

3.3 The Influence of Cognitive Development on Tolerance
29

3.4 Conclusion
31

References
32

4 Justifications Young Children Use
35

4.1 The Relationship Between Fairness (Justice) and Tolerance
35

4.2 The Emergence of Fairness in Young Children
37

4.3 Conclusion
39

References
40

5 The Expressions of Tolerance (Intolerance) Beyond the Age of Seven
43

5.1 Introduction to More Mature Trajectories
43

5.2 Pattern of Responses for Level of Tolerance in Older Participants
44

5.3 The Effect of Story Content on Tolerance
46

5.4 Person-Situation Relationships
47

5.5 The Effect of the Behavioural Dimensions on Tolerance
48

5.6 The Influence of Age and Gender
50

5.7 Conclusion
51

References
52

6 More About Tolerance Justifications
55

6.1 Fairness Empathy and Reason
55

6.2 Fairness Elaborated
56

6.3 Empathetic Orientation and Fairness
58

6.4 Gender Differences in the Use of Empathy
60

6.5 Reason and Logic
63

6.6 Freedom of Speech and Tolerance: The Right to Express Any Opinions Without Restriction or Limits
65

6.7 Conclusion
67

References
68

7 Some Implications for Education
73

7.1 Education for Tolerance and Acceptance Based on Fairness, Empathy and Reason
73

7.2 The Relationship Between Tolerance and Freedom of Speech
77

7.3 Conclusion
78

References
79

Footnotes

1

The terms ‘race’ and ‘racial characteristics’ are frequently used in the psychological literature but these terms do not have a consensual meaning and the use of race can be challenged on theoretical, biological and moral grounds (Helms, Jernigan, & Mascher, 2005). The use of the terms race and racial characteristics in my research follows current psychological conventions, but where possible the term has been replaced by human diversity, which for the purpose of my research refers to racial characteristics, ethnicity and nationality. In the Origin of Species Charles Darwin did ask the question about how many races humans made up. However today with modern scientific knowledge the idea that we belong to different races needs to be questioned and challenged. Populations from different parts of the world are remarkably similar. With some minor variation we humans share up to 99.9% identical DNA genotype with greater variations occurring within specific grouping than between so called races. Genetic and evolutionary studies show that we are all the same (Templeton, 1999). Phenotypes or observable external characteristics, such as skin colour, are not markers of race. This is what we need to teach our children.

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

Rivka T. WitenbergThe Psychology of ToleranceSpringerBriefs in Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3789-5_1

1. Definitions and Method

Rivka T. Witenberg[1]

(1)

Independent Researcher, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Rivka T. Witenberg

Email: riwitenberg@outlook.com

1.1 What is Tolerance: Competing Interpretations and Considerations

The starting point of the research presented in this book about tolerance to human diversity is based on the assumption that tolerance is not simply the absence of prejudice as much of the psychological literature into tolerance presupposes (Witenberg, 2007). Rather tolerance is a separate construct worthy of serious consideration in its own right both philosophically and psychologically (Vogt, 1997; Wainryb, Shaw & Marianus, 1998; Witenberg, 2000b, 2002b, 2007). As described in the introduction meanings of racism and racial prejudice are relatively straightforward as is the meaning of discrimination. “Prejudice reflects an unfavourable judgement towards a particular group. Discrimination involves behaving differently, usually unfairly, toward the members of a group” (Robinson, Witenberg, & Sanson, 2001, p. 5). In comparison, tolerance is a more ambiguous and complex concept open to competing interpretations which further confounds our understanding of tolerance.

Definitions of tolerance to human diversity are not on a continuum from more to less because there are different ways to categorise it. Philosophically and from a theoretical perspective, tolerance is a difficult and an ambiguous concept open to several interpretations, extending from tolerance of forbearance or “putting up with” to full or indiscriminate acceptance of others who are different. Alternatively, tolerance can also be seen as a moral value involving acceptance of others different from us as long as no harm occurs to others. Each one of the different definitions is discussed in turn.

The American philosopher Walzer (1997) defines tolerance as “indifference to difference” of people different from us. However, other philosophers disagree with this characterisation of tolerance because they argue that indifference is irrelevant to the definition of tolerance particularly as tolerance is inherently about competing claims and considerations with other people’s habits, ideas, attitudes and beliefs or even culture and creed. When we are indifferent, we simply do not notice difference (Nehushtan, 2007), an ideal position rarely achieved.

While there are undoubtedly some individuals who are unbiased, impartial and indifferent to how other people eat, dress, pray or look, this seems to be an ideal position but not a realistic one as history has shown. Tolerance comes into bear when we disagree with others about ideas, beliefs and attitudes, and even lifestyle (Habermas, 2003).

Philosophically tolerance comes from the Latin word “tolerable” and is most commonly viewed negatively as endurance or ‘putting up with’ something we dislike or even abhor. Forbearance or endurance without interference is in fact the most commonly accepted definition of tolerance from a philosophical perspective (Forst, 2003, 2008; Oberdiek, 2001; Walzer, 1997). From this perspective, tolerance can be described as the individual enduring that which is disliked, threatening, or what educes negative feelings. However, it also needs to involve some form of compromise (Vogt, 1997). Tolerance defined as endurance involves a recognition that other people have different opinions and practices but it does not entail any form of agreement with or support of the difference. It is simply just enduring or putting up with difference. In a similar vein, Burwood and Wyeth (1998) define tolerance as “an intentional choice not to interfere with conduct which one disapproves” (p. 465). The definition of tolerance as endurance implies that a person can be tolerant and prejudiced simultaneously. One can endure and refrain from acting intolerantly but remain biased, disapproving or even judgemental (e.g., Butrus & Witenberg, 2015; Witenberg, 2007). “This possibility is rarely acknowledged in the literature], which tends to assume that tolerance and prejudice are mutually exclusive and/or are opposites of each other” (Robinson et al., 2001, p. 3). A tutor at a university, for example, in order to maintain his or her teaching position may act in a tolerant manner in spite of holding prejudicial beliefs towards students from a particular ethnic or cultural background. If a person is prepared to “put up with” something along the line of ‘I do not like your religion or skin colour but I will still serve you in my shop because I do not want to lose your custom’, the person does not discriminate openly but remains intolerant in thoughts and beliefs. In reality, tolerance as forbearance leads to individuals who act without discrimination out of restraint, good manners or self-interest but they remain intolerant in thought and belief.

Besides, “tolerance as endurance” also carries with it connotations of superiority at worst, and patience, fortitude and forbearance at best. Embedded in the idea of “tolerance as endurance” is the notion that what is endured is less valued and respected in society or even socially or morally wrong. Who of us wants to be treated with forbearance because of our skin colour, our culture or for that matter our gender, or our religion.

Another way tolerance can be defined is the absence of prejudice of what is disliked, towards those “whose practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one’s own” (Robinson et al., 2001, p. 3). This definition goes beyond enduring or refraining from interfering and focuses on the absence of prejudice. That is, expressions of prejudice and discriminatory acts are absent from the person’s behaviour. This definition of tolerance has been adopted by much of the research into prejudice, particularly in research with children (Aboud, 2005, 2008; Aboud & Levy, 2000; Doyle & Aboud, 1995). However, absence of prejudice is just that and does not necessarily imply tolerance. The absence of prejudicial expressions and discriminatory behaviour towards others is not necessarily evidence of tolerance particularly in a young child who may not have even noticed the markers of racial or cultural difference (Robinson et al., 2001, Witenberg, 2000b, 2007). It is true that young children are capable of recognising differences between people but their awareness is not only about skin colour but also gender differences (Katz & Downey, 2002). Such findings suggest awareness of difference more generally which is not necessarily based on prejudice. The capacity for children to recognise difference in others different from them is discussed in more detail in Chap. 3.

Prejudice and tolerance are different psychological constructs and the lack of one does not necessarily entail the presence of the other. A person can be tolerant to a particular group and simultaneously be prejudiced to another group. (e.g., Witenberg, 2007). However, for tolerance not to be mindless Burwood and Wyeth (1998) argue that we should reach an intentional position of what we approve or disapprove. Otherwise tolerance without conscious reflection, deliberation and intention is mindless. Thus, another view of tolerance is that it involves a conscious rejection of prejudicial attitudes, beliefs and discriminatory behviour. That is, “one’s own negative stereotypes are recognised, judged against experiential knowledge or value systems, and rejected” (Robinson et al., 2001, p. 4.). This is a form of tolerance which is reflective, conscious and considered. It entails awareness of whom and under what circumstances prejudice and discrimination are rejected. Recognising and rejecting prejudicial views moves a person from simply being “a narrow-minded bigot who shows restraint” (Burwood & Wyeth, 1998, p. 469) to a person who is tolerant both in judgements and conduct.

When differences between the “others” and oneself are recognised and acknowledged possibly the strongest and most ideal way to think of tolerance emerges. This form of tolerance involves a conscious rejection of biased attitudes, beliefs and behaviour and is centred on full acceptance of others and the valuing of them irrespective of their skin colour, culture or creed. According to Walzer (1997), acceptance of difference and diversity also entails “enthusiastic endorsement of difference” (p. 11).

Although seemingly an ideal form of tolerance, uncritical acceptance in its most extreme form could lead to acceptance of questionable practices and human rights violations. For instance, if freedom of speech is extended indiscriminately to all forms of intolerant views, including neo-Nazi propaganda, then we are facing a conceptual as well as a practical paradox (Oberdiek, 2001; Witenberg, 2007). Therefore, what is often overlooked is that full acceptance has its limitation too. This is because tolerance is paradoxical in nature in that we can and possibly should be intolerant to tolerance in some cases. Limits of tolerance and how it is determined is one of the difficulties in dealing with it in both theory and practice. For example, we are intolerant to tolerance in rejection acts that possibly most of us regard as unacceptable yet acceptable in other cultures. What do we do with child marriages where relationships between a child and adults are harmful to the child? In such cases where others are harmed in spite of accepted cultural practices we need to reflect on the paradoxical nature of tolerance. It, cannot be impartial in such cases. Rather it is value laden as we need to reflect carefully on right and wrong, good and bad. It is an ethical and moral principle and the assumption that any form of abuse or restriction of other people’s civil and human rights is acceptable is a misunderstanding of the very nature of tolerance. To accept tolerance without some form of reflection, consideration and limits is a questionable practice. To marry off girls as young as 12 years of age to much old men, to name one example, ought not, and should not, be tolerated. It may seem openminded to say we should not condone it because it is a cultural custom but, according to UNICEF, child marriages, whether girls or boys, are a violation of children’s rights. The impact on the child is physical, social and psychological and often entails a health risk, particularly for girls who experience early pregnancy and social isolation. In a liberal society we cannot dismiss such behaviour as simply customary and accept it. Tolerance is paradoxical in nature because limiting tolerance is a very controversial issue at times and by default could be interpreted as intolerance. Whether it is on individual or state levels, being tolerant to intolerance can be seen as intolerance in itself. Undoubtedly, there are some religious and cultural practices we cannot endorse because the harm they inflict on the individual, such as underage marriages. This is the paradoxical nature of tolerance. Making decisions about what is acceptable and what is not requires normative values and clear reasoning rather than gut reactions. Tolerance becomes meaningless without judgement about what is acceptable and what is not. Without reflection and judgements, limits on tolerance are generally impossible.

What constitutes harm is not always easy to determine. Nevertheless, it is only when we can decide what is harmful that we can make judgements about what is intolerable. What is required are guiding principles of normative values. In philosophy, normative values are about what is good and bad, how we should and ought to behave and whether actions are right or wrong. Such ideas bring us into the realm of morality. Therefore, another way to think of tolerance is to place it within the moral domain.

Philosophers argue that today most of us should and do regard tolerance as a positive civic and moral duty discharged between individuals who are of equal value. It is a moral obligation bound by mutual respect and consideration between people (Dusche, 2002; Rawls, 1971, 2001; Walzer, 1997) and, perhaps most importantly, it entails respect for the autonomy of the individual. Tolerance is an antidote to intolerance and prejudice and without doubt an essential element in social cohesion (Blum, 1999; Dusche, 2002; Vogt, 1997; Walzer, 1997). The idea that tolerance is a moral duty has been debated and acknowledged by earlier civil libertarians. For example, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza and John Stuart Mill argued that tolerance presupposes the value of the individual, his or her autonomy and freedom of choice. According to Mill, the only legitimate ground to interfere with our liberty and coerce us is to prevent harm. Actions should be controlled if they cause harm to others. To Mill, harm means genuine harm, it does not mean offence (Mill, 1859/1978).

Many recent philosophers have linked tolerance with respect, equality and liberty. This allows for the coexistence of conflicting claims of beliefs, values and ideas as long as they are compatible with moral values (Dusche, 2002; Oberdiek, 2001). When tolerance is placed within the moral domain pertaining to equality, justice, respect and avoiding harm to others, it should be viewed as positive in nature. Hence, the research about tolerance to human diversity discussed in the following chapters used the following definition which emphasises the person as an active, conscious and reflective person.

Tolerance is the conscious affirmation of favourable judgments and beliefs involving principles of justice, equality (fairness), care (empathy) and consideration for the plight of others… (Witenberg, 2007, p. 435)

Justice involves being fair and even-handed, as well as free from bias, while equality is about according others equal rights, status and opportunities. Care is about empathy and sympathy to the plight of others. Further, a conscious and reflective person is able to make judgements that take into account what is acceptable and what is not. This inevitably leads to some ideas, beliefs and lifestyles being rejected because they are intolerable, such as forced underage marriages and child labour. Care and empathy are essential in a definition of tolerance. That is, the ability to step into another’s shoes and understand cognitively and emotionally how another individual may feel and experience the world.

In conclusion, there are many different definitional perspectives about tolerance to human diversity ranging from indifference to placing tolerance within the moral domain. While many previous psychological studies defined tolerance as absence of prejudice a more comprehensive definition involves a person who is able to deliberate about prejudice and consciously reject it in favour of tolerance on the basis of fairness/justice, empathy and reason/logic.

1.2 Measuring Tolerance

There are also issues about how tolerance should be measured. The measures used in this research did not ask participants about prejudice or tolerance directly, rather, participants were asked to respond to different critical events presented in dilemma-like stories which could be resolved with either tolerant or intolerant judgements and justifications. The use of dilemma-like stories goes beyond what has traditionally been possible with attitude and belief scales commonly used to measure prejudice and tolerance.

In the prejudice research, Likert-style scales are widely used to measure the strength of attitudes and beliefs. These scales measure levels of agreement or disagreement with specific statements or questions. For example, the first question in The Social Dominance Orientations Test is, “Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups” (Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, 1994). Responses are based on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 = very positive through to 7 = very negative or in the more recent test, 1 = strongly oppose to 7 = strongly favour. Participants are instructed to respond in a way which shows how much they favour or oppose an idea (Ho et al., 2015). However, prejudice and particularly discrimination towards others do not occur in a social vacuum. For example, reports to the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s (2004) study into racial prejudice in the Australian environment indicates that prejudice occurs in a specific context and under specific circumstances to specific people. Likert-type measures such as The Social Dominance Orientations Test do not capture this specificity.

To capture the specificity of prejudice and discrimination, the design of the studies in our research involved real-life critical incidents in the form of dilemma-like stories which required participants to indicate how they wold respond to the stories which could be resolved with either tolerant or intolerant judgements and justifications. The objective of such methodology is to map the relationships between reasoning patterns, underlying beliefs, contextual information, age and gender about tolerance to human diversity. This is in contrast to other tolerance measures which tend to use attitude tests or Likert Scales. Similar criticism can be levelled at personality tests that purport to measure tolerance. For example, the Jackson Personality Inventory (JPI) (Jackson, 1997). What we learn from this measure is that respondents are tolerant, somewhat tolerant or not tolerant at all. However, there is a clear disadvantage associated with the lack of specificity in such scores. We do not know the likelihood to whom and under what circumstances respondents extend their tolerance or how they conceptualise tolerance and how it develops.

Therefore, the use of critical incidents presented in dilemma-like stories go beyond what has traditionally been possible with attitude belief and personality scales. In contrast, in the moral and prosocial domains, researchers often adopt such an approach (e.g., Kohlberg, 1981, 1984). Typically, such a method maps children’s, adolescents’ and young adults’ reasoning and judgements using stories or dilemmas that present a character with conflicting events requiring resolution which allow respondents to draw on their own unique viewpoint based on their knowledge and experience (e.g., Kohlberg, 1981, 1984; Nucci, Camino, & Sapiro, 1996). In this way use of dilemma-like stories goes beyond the traditional use of attitude and belief scales.

Thus, the main purpose of the research was to determine the kind of underlying beliefs respondents used and how they conceptualised tolerance through examination of their judgements and justifications to critical incidents. Hence, after being presented with stories of the critical incidents a series of questions probed their responses to the incidents. As noted above, while there are a number of philosophical theories about tolerance, less is known about what kind of beliefs people hold and what kind of judgements and justifications they use to support their tolerant stance. In examining underlying beliefs through judgements and justifications a deeper understanding of the dynamics of tolerance was achieved.

In sum, the purpose of the research was to address issues that have not been fully investigated previously. The research was designed to develop a measure to generate a model mapping the occurrence of tolerance and intolerance towards others who are different in colour, culture and ethnicity. In order to investigate how positive attitudes and beliefs about tolerance to human diversity are conceptualized by the majority of the young people aged between six to 24 years we developed a cognitive developmental tool. We used this tool to assess attitudes/thoughts/ideas (measured through expressed judgements) and underlying beliefs (measured through expressed justifications) towards human diversity in specific contexts. Possible age-and gender-related differences were also explored. Specifically, age-related developmental trends were examined to assess a possible developmental trajectory relevant to tolerance. We examined the developmental trajectory of tolerance and intolerance in young males and females aged between six and 24 years of age.

Whether tolerance is an issue that is general in nature or affected by the contextual information was also examined. Context in this research involved two aspects. Firstly, the research examined situational context or to whom and under what circumstances participants were willing to extend their tolerance. The second context was behavioural dimensions and involved making judgements about three different aspects of tolerance, holding prejudicial beliefs, talking about such beliefs and acting on them (i.e., beliefs, speech acts). The idea about behavioural dimensions was adopted from belief discrepancy tolerance research (Wainryb et al., 1998).

In order to expand the limited available knowledge concerning the influence of context on judgements and the age-related progression of tolerance judgements and justifications, children, younger and older adolescents and young adults were asked to reason about and make judgements about three different dilemma-like stories based on real-life incidents which could be resolved using either tolerant or intolerant judgements. The measures used in this research presented the participants with both the positive and negative considerations. At no time were the measures explicit in their request for responses in either a favourable or unfavourable way. Most importantly, expressions such as prejudice or tolerance were never used in order to avoid both priming and social desirability effects.

As discussed earlier, unlike most previous analyses, this method focused not simply on attituded (e.g., true/false or agree/disagree) but on a more fine-grained analysis of judgements and justification. Tolerance judgements were assessed on the basis of a 4-point rating scale (Witenberg, 2000a, 2000b; 2002a, 2002b), described in more details below. Justifications were assessed using in-depth examination of thinking processes and underlying beliefs, categorising and assessing the frequency of their occurrence in response to the critical incidents. The events were based on real-life incidents gathered from reports in newspapers, individual experiences and from official sources, such as the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s studies into racial prejudice in the Australian environment (1997, 2004, 2006). A similar process was undertaken in the Israeli Study (Witenberg & Cinamon, 2006; Witenberg et al. 2003). Using a more process-orientated methodology allows for tapping into less automatic non-monitored ideas, beliefs and feelings behind the kind of justifications used when considering situations with the potential for tolerance or intolerance.

The format of the questions was based on previous empirical and theoretical analyses found useful in eliciting responses reflecting the reasoning process (Kuhn, 1988, 1991, 2002), Decision Theory (Abelson & Levi, 1983) and decision making (Wang & Ruhe, 2007) as well as examination of underlying beliefs (Brown et al., 1989). Hence the format of the questions remained the same across all three stories.

Each story or context described the behaviours of two gender neutral protagonists, one who display intolerant behaviours and one who is tolerant. To avoid social desirability bias, the stories were presented with competing considerations. That is, a negative belief that involved some form of intolerance was followed by a positive belief presenting the opposite view (See below for a more detailed account of the stories.). Each story could be resolved using either tolerant or intolerant views.

To explore behavioural dimensions of tolerance, each story was presented three times and each presentation dealt with a different aspect of the behavioural dimension: holding prejudicial beliefs, expressing such beliefs, and acting on these beliefs. In the first instance the protagonist of the story holds prejudicial beliefs or not, in the second the protagonist tells others about these beliefs or not and in the final presentation acts or not on these beliefs (Wainryb et al., 1998). For example,

I know a storekeeper who believes/talks about/acts on that you should serve people from Asian backgrounds last because they do not belong in Australia. Another storekeeper believes/talks about/acts it is wrong to serve people from Asian backgrounds last because they do not belong in Australia.

As the main purpose of the study was to determine how tolerance was conceptualised through the examination of justifications used, a series of questions were designed to probe participants’ judgements, explanations and justifications. The questions are presented below. In each instance, when responding to the first question, participants were asked to make a judgement about the event presented in the story. Specifically, this aimed to assess whether a favourable or unfavourable attitude or idea was expressed through the kind of judgments participants were making. The subsequent three questions aimed to elicit participants’ reasoning underlying their judgements/decisions. Question 2 and 3 asked for explanations for the specific judgement/decision and for participants to express their own ideas about the event. The final question aimed to obtain justifications for the specific stance that had been taken. Participants were asked to respond to the following four questions in turn after reading each story.

1. 1.

“Do you think it is all right or not all right” to believe in, speak about or act on (giving lower marks to Aboriginal students because they are black; not employing English people because they are lazy; and serving Asian customers last because they do not belong in Australia).

2. 2.

“Can you explain why?”

3. 3.

“What do you actually think about it?”

4. 4.

“If I told you I would do the very opposite, how would you convince me that you made the right choice and my choice is wrong?”

The key figures used in the stories for the Australian studies originated from either Asian, Indigenous Australian, English and/or Middle East backgrounds. In the Israeli study, the key figures in each story originated from three different backgrounds: Ethiopian, Russian and Israeli. In order to avoid order effect, the order of the presentation of the stories was systematically counterbalanced for each subgroup of age and gender.

The older age groups made written responses. At the beginning of the session, which was conducted in the participants’ respective classrooms, they were assured that individual questionnaires could not be identified and they were encouraged to respond with honesty. At the end of the session, participants were debriefed and informed that the researchers did not endorse the negative views presented in the stories.

The youngest participants were presented with the same story format and content but the incidents were adjusted to be conceptually accessible to children aged six to seven years, with the help of the participating school principals and Grade 1 coordinators. Chapter 3 describes in more details the method used for this age group.

1.3 Scoring and Measurement Issues

The transcripts were read several times. The first reading was to gain an overall view of the transcript. The second reading aimed to analyse the response patterns either supporting or rejecting tolerance when responding to Question 1 for each story. Responses were classified into two categories: ‘tolerant’ responses (affirming tolerance) and ‘intolerant’ responses (disaffirming tolerance). For example, affirmation of tolerance included responses such as ‘It’s not OK to believe such a thing’, ‘It’s wrong to stop them’, or It’s not all right at all’ Disaffirmation included such comments as ‘It’s OK, I have no problem with it’ or ‘It’s fine with me. He can believe what he wants.’

Analyses considered firstly the pattern of tolerance and intolerance. Responses for each story and for each dimension were assessed using the four-point rating scale which was developed across a series of pilot studies. In the first instance a response was categorised as either tolerant or intolerant on the basis of each participant’s judgement. Level of tolerance for both stories and dimensions depended on the number of responses that are coded as tolerant or intolerant as shown below in Fig. 1.1. The four-point rating scale was then applied. Therefore, a score of:

Fig. 1.1

Tolerance rating score for story

- 1 = intolerant on all three behavioural dimensions (belief, public speech, act) for story or within dimensions

- 2 = tolerant on one behavioural dimension and intolerant on two dimensions for story or within dimensions

- 3 = tolerant on two behavioural dimensions, intolerant on one dimension for story or within dimension

- 4 = tolerant on all three behavioural dimensions (belief, speech, act) for story or within dimension.

Level of tolerance for each situational/story context and each behavioural context depended on the number of responses that were coded as tolerant or intolerant. Six scores were calculated for each participant using the four-point rating scale: a separate score for each situational/story context (i.e., Ethiopian, Russian, Israeli) and a separate score for each behavioural context (i.e., belief, speech, act).

Thus, each participant received a score ranging from one to four for each story and also for each behavioural dimension; consequently, participants received six scores overall. A score of ‘1’ represented all intolerant responses; ‘2’ represented one tolerant and two intolerant responses; ‘3’ represented two tolerant and one intolerant response; and ‘4’ represented all tolerant responses. Hence, higher scores indicated higher levels of tolerance.

In order to ascertain inter-rater reliability, one third of the responses from the total set were re-coded by a second coder for each study examining judgements Inter-rater reliability was found to be between 0.90 and 0.95 (Cohen’s Kappa, Cohen, 1960).

While it is important to know whether young people are tolerant or not, how they reason about taking a tolerant (or intolerant) stance is equally important. Thus, the third reading aimed to determine the kind of explanations and justifications participants used to support their judgement for each of the stories. Therefore, the analysis focused primarily on the responses to Question 2, 3 and 4. Reasoning responses were analysed using the coding schemes presented in Table 1.1. The coding schemes were developed based on pilot studies and previous research (Witenberg, 2002a, 2002b, Witenberg & McDowall, 2001). The categories were designed to reflect underlying beliefs that guided participants’ reasoning. Participants’ responses were assigned to one or more of the categories that were not mutually exclusive of each other.

Content analysis of the early research revealed 10 justification categories for the tolerant responses. Nonmetric Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) utilising ASCAL in SPSS was used to explore their relationship to each other. Specifically, the generative model was employed across the 10 justifications assessing the relationship between justification variables. The goodness of fit was suitably high with the stress coefficient found to be 634 and the RSQ indication a 99.51% fit with the results suggesting that fairness, empathy and reason best described the data. Examples of each belief category including freedom of speech are found in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1

Belief categories and examples of justifications

Belief category

Description and examples of justifications

Fairness

Expressed through appeal to equality, similarities, differences and rights. (‘It’s not fair’; ‘We are all equal’; ‘We are all different’ and ‘We are all alike’; ‘I would explain that we are all equal and it shouldn’t matter where you come from or what you are.’; ‘We should all be treated fairly and equally’; ‘It’s wrong because black people are just the same as us no different.’; ‘People are different from each other. It doesn’t matter if you are black, white or Asian we should all be treated fairly’

Empathy

Expressed through appeal to personal feelings, perspective taking or hurt (‘Your choice is wrong because if all the Aboriginal people were living on one street and they didn’t let you live there, how would you feel?’; ‘I would ask you what you would do if you stood in the Asian’s shoes. How would you feel?’; ‘They shouldn’t be allowed to say these sorts of things because it could make Asian young people depressed and hurt.’; ‘It can be hurtful and give them [people from an Aboriginal background] a complex.’)

Reason

Expressed through suggestions of unreasonable or ‘unreflective’ ideas and through challenging generalisations and assumptions (‘I personally think that it’s stupid that a person can think like that.’; ‘Because racism is bad and it’s stupid and illogical.’; ‘This person is misinformed. I think that this is a really irrational attitude.’; ‘This person is making a rash generalisation. I would point out that some Asian people have lived here longer than some white people’.)

Freedoms

Expressed through appeal to freedom of speech and freedom of opinions. (‘Everybody has the right to have their own opinion and talk about them.’; ‘If this person wants to think such things he can do so because this is a free society and we have no right to persuade him otherwise—he has the right to think what he wants.’; ‘I believe she/he has the right to state her/his opinion and can share her/his opinion with others. We live in a free society and we have the right to say what we believe.’)

Prejudice

Expressed through appeal to traditional or personal biases. Asians do not belong in Australia

Others

Miscellaneous and unelaborated responses that cannot be coded

Using the categories described in Table 1.1, the transcripts were further analysed for content through a process of colour coding to establish the most frequently used category and categories for each story. Colour coding is a type of content analysis which is a manual but systematic research tool to determine themes, ideas underlying beliefs and concepts emerging from the text. It has been used to interpret moral narratives, conflicts, and choices (Brown et al., 1989). For the ‘tolerant’ responses affirming tolerance, the following categories emerged: judgement made on the basis of fairness; judgement made on the basis of fairness and empathy where appeal to both fairness and empathy was used with similar frequency; judgement made on the basis of reflective thinking (reason); and idiosyncratic responses. The dual response of fairness and empathy was classified as one category labelled fairness/empathy.

A similar process was undertaken for the ‘intolerant’ responses disaffirming tolerance. The following belief categories emerged in this part of the analysis: judgement made on the basis of freedom of opinion and/or freedom of speech (freedoms); judgement made on the basis of prejudicial beliefs; and idiosyncratic responses.

The final reading aimed to assess variations in the response pattern across the three stories. Based on colour coding, the analysis revealed that the contextual information or the content of the stories generally did not influence overall belief categories used to support either a tolerant or an intolerant stance across the three stories. That is, participants expressed a predominant belief or a combination of beliefs across the three stories, irrespective of the context. For example, one participant used the following justifications for the three stories ‘It is not fair that they [students from Aboriginal backgrounds] should get lower marks; it should be decided on the way they do their work’; ‘Asian people may look different but we are all the same. We should treat them fairly’; and ‘It’s not fair to stop someone from getting a job just because they are English’. As the examples illustrate, a respondent may justify his or her judgements with story-specific references, but the underlying belief that guided the reasoning remained the same across the three stories and in this case involved a belief about the principle of fairness. From about 11 years of age, it was found that the behavioural dimensions did affect responses with the speech dimension generation freedom of speech responses, such as “This is a fee country, he has the right to say what he wants”.

An independent judge coded a randomly-selected set of at least one-quarter of the responses for each study that assessed justifications (for example, Neale, 2002; Witenberg, 2002a; 2007) using the belief categories described in Table 1.1. The judge was not instructed and no discussion took place about the individual categories. Inter-rater reliability was found to range between 0.75 and 0.82 using Kappa for the four major belief categories of fairness, fairness/empathy, reason/reflective thinking and freedoms. Hence a good to high rate of agreement was reached between the two raters in each case (Landis & Koch, 1977).

Finally, due to the cultural diversity of the Australian society, one of the first issues that we examined was the possibility that cultural origin as defined by the parents’ place of birth would be a significant variable in determining tolerance judgements. No significant relationships between the cultural origin of parents and students’ tolerance judgements were found (Witenberg, 2002a). In light of this finding, no further analyses were undertaken which involved cultural origin.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

Rivka T. WitenbergThe Psychology of ToleranceSpringerBriefs in Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3789-5_2

2. Previous Research About Tolerance

Rivka T. Witenberg[1]

(1)

Independent Researcher, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Rivka T. Witenberg

Email: riwitenberg@outlook.com

2.1 Political and Belief Discrepancy Tolerance

This chapter summaries some of the literature about studies which have explored aspects of tolerance not as a function of absence of prejudice. Psychological research about tolerance has mainly focused on political and belief discrepancy tolerance rather than tolerance more generally. According to Patricia Avery political tolerance is the willingness to extend basic rights and civil liberties to people and groups whose viewpoints differ from one’s own (Avery, 1988). Findings from earlier psychological studies about political tolerance in the 1970’s and 1980’s concluded that the abstract nature of human rights such as freedom of speech created conceptual problems for children and young adolescents (Gallatin & Adelson, 1970; Melton & Limber, 1992). However, Helwig (1995, 1998) argued that methodological rather than cognitive and conceptual difficulties were the reason that children and young adolescents appeared to have limited understanding of freedom of speech. According to Helwig, it was the contextual information in the stimulus material in which the problem was presented that influenced the conceptualisation of freedom of speech rather than cognitive limitations of young children. Based on his studies in Canada and the USA, Helwig (1995, 1998) concluded that children have a basic understanding of freedom of speech tolerance as early as six years of age as long as they were presented with material which does not place freedom of speech in conflict with other rights.

In one of the studies Helwig (1995) asked young people aged between 12 and 20 years to respond to both common questions about freedom of speech as well as questions about stories which either did or did not involve conflicts between freedom of speech and other rights. The findings of this study showed that as long as freedom of speech was not in conflict with other rights, young adolescents from 13 years of age could conceptualise and affirm freedom of speech. However, when freedom of speech was in conflict with other values, 13-year-old students were then more likely to subordinate freedom of speech in favour of laws which restricted freedom of speech, even if they condemned these laws. As part of a larger study, Helwig (1998) investigated the ability of younger children aged between 6 and 11 years to conceptualise freedom of speech. He found that the majority of children affirmed freedom of speech in straightforward situations when it was not in conflict with other rights. However, Neff and Helwig (2002) found that older adolescents and young adults were more likely to subordinate other rights, such as equality, to freedom of speech. They justified these decisions by appealing to democratic principles often quite abstract in nature.

The implications that can be drawn from these studies are that the conceptualisation of freedom of speech emerges quite early in children’s development but that the development is affected by the context in which the problem is presented. That is, freedom of speech is endorsed when it is not in conflict with other rights. In situations when freedom of speech is in conflict with other rights, there is a tendency for young adolescents from 13 years of age to subordinate freedom of speech to other rights to avoid harm and inequality. The reverse is true for older adolescents and young adults who tend to subordinate other rights such as equality to free speech, recognising the democratic implications about suppressing freedom of speech tolerance (see also Witenberg, 2004). Thus, collectively this research has shown that younger children can understand the intricacy of such complex ideas as freedom of speech contingent on the context in which the problem is presented. Other studies in the USA and Norway (Melton & Limbert, 1992) as well as in South Africa (Peens, 1997) confirm that primary school children as young as six years of age have distinct, if immature, concepts of rights. “Young children develop notions of rights that are differentiated in important respects from legal rules and social conventions” (Neff & Helwig, 2002, p. 1433) and they acknowledge them as universal moral rights which cut across cultural settings even when laws may deny these rights (Neff & Helwig, 2002). Such findings about political tolerance reinforces my contention that support for universal rights are not about forbearance or putting up with, a definition favoured by political tolerance, but rather about fairness and justice.

In other studies, about political tolerance, similar findings emerge about children’s, adolescents’ and young adults’ conceptualisation of civil rights. Tolerance in these studies was defined as the willingness to extend civil rights such as freedom of speech to a range of disliked social, racial, religious, and political groups (Owen & Dennis, 1987). For example, in a series of studies using a cognitive developmental approach, Enright and Lapsely (1981) asked students from Grade 1 through College to judge people with discrepant beliefs from those of the participants’ own beliefs on a range of social, moral, and political dilemmas. The aim of this research was to understand how tolerant the participating students would be towards those who hold different beliefs from them. Enright and Lapsely concluded that tolerance involved a four-level age-related progression from less to more tolerance toward those holding discrepant beliefs, consistent with Piagetian development. What this research did not consider however, was the possible influence of context on the developmental progression. What later research established was that the development of political tolerance was not invariant and that responses varied considerably particularly for the younger children. Variation in responses depended on the popularity of the ideas ‘disagreeing others’ held or expressed. Overall, the data showed age related differences with tolerance levels increasing with age, but when context or situational information was considered no global construct for belief discrepancy tolerance emerged.

Just over a decade later, Sigelman and Toebben (1992) examined the development of both political and belief-discrepancy tolerance of Grade 2, 5 and 8 students and found that situational information contributed to variations in responses. Specifically, they assessed level of political tolerance of American children and young adolescents as measured by their support for freedom of speech towards individuals who either hold distasteful or popular proposals. The results of the study showed that at least 94% of grade 2 students were willing to extend freedom of speech to individuals proposing a popular idea. However, the majority of them believed that those proposing distasteful ideas should not be allowed to express them publicly. Sigelman and Toeben conclude that “among young children, different judgments appear to be part of a global tendency towards tolerant or intolerant responding” (p. 555). However, with increasing age, students were more willing to extend freedom of speech to individuals who held distasteful proposals and frequently justified their judgements by referring explicitly to civil and democratic rights. Generally, the research about extending civil rights, such as freedom of speech, to disliked groups has shown that while there are few age-related differences in the primary school years, important developmental changes occur during adolescence and early adulthood.

Of further interest is a study by Wainryb and her colleagues (1998) which examined under what circumstances and what behaviours students from Grade 1 through to College age students would extend their tolerance to individuals who held discrepant or disagreeable beliefs from their own (Wainryb et al., 1998). In line with previous research, Wainryb et al., found age-related differences suggesting a gradual progression from childhood to adolescence that ranged from less to more tolerance toward others with discrepant beliefs. However, this progression was mediated by situational information. Specifically, the kind of behaviours students were asked to accept (i.e., contextual cues about dissenting beliefs, speech, and actions) influenced participants’ tolerance levels. Irrespective of age, holding dissenting beliefs was the most tolerated behaviour, whereas engaging in actions based on these beliefs was least tolerated. The data also showed that the different dimensions of tolerance accounted for 42% of the variance in tolerance judgements. Wainryb et al. (1998) also hypothesised that tolerance to disagreeable ideas emerged after a process of deliberation about the contextual cues presented in the stimulus material. In summary, the study found that participants were more tolerant of people holding disagreeable or unconventional beliefs than of speaking about such beliefs. They were least tolerant of acting on such beliefs. Such findings do not support global stage development but rather highlight that the domain-specific approach may explain the data better than global stage theories.

In a later study which examined how acceptable divergent beliefs are, Wainryb and her colleagues (2001) established that irrespective of age, participants aged between eight and 21 years found discrepant or disagreeable beliefs acceptable in knowledge, social and psychological domains but not when it involved moral beliefs (Wainryb et al., 2001). Divergent moral beliefs were viewed differently and were regarded as wrong and unacceptable. The implication is that moral beliefs are viewed as immutable while more general beliefs are not. That is, holding the belief that hurting others was acceptable was regarded as intolerable, while divergent beliefs about how to make friends were acceptable. Similar findings emerged with younger children aged five, seven and nine. “Most children made nontolerant judgments of divergent moral beliefs, and reasoned that divergent moral beliefs (but rarely other divergent beliefs) result in harm or unfairness to others” (Wainryb et al., 2004, p. 698).

More recently, a Dutch study found that Dutch adolescents were more tolerant of Muslim parents speaking publicly about treating boys and girls differently or speaking about minimal female circumcision, but they were much less accepting about acting on such ideas or beliefs (Verkuyten & Slooter, 2008), supporting the Wainryb et al., findings about belief discrepancy tolerance. Participants clearly adjusted their tolerance or acceptance in accordance with the relative harm that dissenting beliefs, speech or acts could cause and assumed that speaking out about such beliefs was less harmful than acting on them. Again, tolerance appeared to emerge after a conscious process of deliberation, given that participants seemed to weigh different factors in making their judgments. Other studies show that contextual factors, such as wearing of the headscarf by female Muslim students, building Islamic schools, refusing to shake hands and speeches by an Imam that raise moral considerations are judged differently by Dutch students aged between 12 and 17 years. Wearing the headscarf was regarded as a personal issue and more acceptable than raising moral issues by the Imam. Building Islamic schools and not shaking hands were viewed as social issues and fell between the personal and the moral in level of acceptance (Gieling, Thijs, & Verkuyten, 2010). In other words, discrepant personal acts were acceptable to young Dutch people while discrepant moral ones were the least acceptable with discrepant social acts falling between the two. Interestingly, another study in 2010 which examined political tolerance of Dutch school aged students aged between 11 and 17 found that symbolic and safety threats were both independently and negatively related to level of tolerance for Muslims. Specifically, what the study found was that any difference in values, norms and beliefs that threatens the viewpoint of the majority group resulted in negative feelings about Muslims. Participating students also expressed a belief that presence of Muslims could lead to violence. Very importantly the only difference between those participants who were prejudices and those who were not was the finding that nonprejudiced students perceived no safety threat and therefore could be more tolerant to diversity which in this case were Muslims (Van der Noll, Verkuyten, & Poppe, 2010). Gibson (2006) also found treat to be the best predictor of intolerance to others.

The reviewed studies are examples of a larger body of literature which endorses the idea that political and belief-discrepancy tolerance is not a global construct and that whom we are asked to tolerate, what we are asked to tolerate and under what circumstances we are willing to tolerate others influence how tolerant we are.

Other factors that influences political tolerance and tolerance more generally are personality variables. Research indicates that positive personality variables influence both political tolerance and tolerance in general (Butrus & Witenberg, 2015; Mondak & Halperin, 2008; Marcus, Sullivan, Thiess-Morse, & Stevens, 2005). These findings are further examined in Chap. 6. The next sections reviews findings about young children’s understanding of difference and the acceptance of others different from them.

2.2 Research About Young Children Understanding of Others Different from Them

Much of the research about the development of children’s understanding of tolerance of others who are different from them has been examined through research about prejudice and not through either tolerance as a concept in its own right or through the moral domain. In contrast, there is an important and large body of research that has examined prejudice, using social cognitive and social identity theories (Aboud, 2005, 2008; Aboud & Levy, 2000; Doyle & Aboud, 1995) among others. However, from a developmental perspective, the emphasis has been primarily about the development of prejudice in young children (Nesdale, 2001, 2004, Nesdale et al., 2007). For example, research has shown that some white American and Canadian children between four and seven years of age tended to show same-group favouritism while simultaneously holding moderate negative attitudes toward people from other racial or ethnic backgrounds (Katz & Downey 2002). However, this form of prejudice was thought to decline after seven years of age (Aboud, 1988). Similarly, an Italian study of 368 children between the ages of four to 12 years also found that younger white children between four and eight years of age displayed ethnic racial attitudes and favoured their own group. However, by the age of eight the children tended to display more often pro-black and anti-white stereotypical beliefs (De Caroli & Sagon, 2013), illustrating age-related changes. Longitudinal research, studies by Katz and her colleagues (Katz & Barrett, 1997; Katz & Downey, 2002) came to the conclusion that young children are aware of differences and are certainly not colour blind.

There appears to be an interesting mosaic of early predictors. Some have to do with children’s own abilities and responses and their racial group. Others had to do with their peer group, their social environment, and their parents’ behavior and values. (Katz, 2003, p. 11)

Surprisingly there are also studies that show that children become aware of others who are different from them as early as six months of age. In habituation and dishabituation studies conducted by Katz and colleagues, it was found that 6 months old babies spend significantly more time looking at novel racial cues, however they also spend significant more time gazing at novel gender clues (Katz & Downey, 2002). Such findings clearly indicate some form of interest in difference but whether it can be called race bias is questionable. However, from about three years of age children do become aware of physical differences, cultural practices and social attitudes as part of the learning process (Turiel, 2002). They learn both positive and negative ideas, attitudes and beliefs about difference between people and about what they should fear. It is most likely that it is both the biased and unbiased messages they receive from others which influence their thinking and action about others different to them. As argued earlier, beliefs about others and the world do not emerge in a vacuum in that children learn about colour and cultural differences early if they are exposed to such experience. They learn it from general interaction, and not always from their parents. In fact, Katz (2003) concluded that children’s and parents’ attitudes do not necessarily converge. She suggests that this could be because parents are reluctant to talk about issues such as race and so children can develop beliefs that are different from their parents through interaction with others such as kindergarten and school friends as well as exposure to the general community. Katz tells an interesting story about a young girl in her study who exhibited anti-black bias but interviews with the girl’s parents did not support this bias and they were very surprised to discover their child’s anti-black bias. Nonetheless, parents, no doubt, have a great influence but so do peers, the school system and what they watch on television among other influences (Dahl, 2017; Degner & Dalege, 2013; Derman-Sparks, Higa & Sparks, 1980; Towles-Schwen & Fazio, 2001; Winkler, 2009). When it comes to older children and adolescents there is limited research about the influence of parents on their offspring. Studies that have examined the influence of parents on adolescents have found significant correlations between parents and adolescents’ level of tolerance and prejudice (Carlson & Iovini, 1985; O’Bryan, Fishbein, & Ritchey, 2004). For example, Towles-Schwen and Fazio (2001) found that university students claimed that they had learnt from their parents, when young not to be prejudiced towards others different from them and they also viewed their parent as tolerant. The researchers speculated that open minded values learnt at home play an important role in adult life in regard to being tolerant or not. Open mindedness was also found to be a significant predictor of tolerance in several studies, including one in Australia. These findigs will be discussed in Chap. 6.

In contrast, Australian studies have failed to uncover ethnic bias in young children as in the case of American and Canadian studies. For example, Robinson and Maine (1998) found no ethnic bias in children aged between four and six towards, children of Italian, Greek, Asian and English migrants. The findings about children aged between seven and 12 is less conclusive, with some indications that negative attitudes remain until the age of 12 in some young people. Other research findings showing that negative attitudes decline from seven years onward (Black-Gutman & Hickson, 1996). This decline of prejudice was only partially supported by Augoustinos and Rosenwarne (2001) who found that the decline of ethnic bias in seven-year olds was in the predicted direction but only approaching significance. Importantly, they did confirm that eight to nine-year olds were more likely to express personal and positive beliefs of others different from them which diverged from cultural stereotypes. In other words, the children knew the prevailing stereotypes but were also able to reject them in favour of their own beliefs about others different from them, something children up to the age of seven could not. The data showed that five-to six-year-old children were less successful in differentiation between cultural stereotypes and their own beliefs. The implications that can be drawn from such findings may possibly indicate cognitive limitations and insufficient knowledge base rather than pure prejudice. At the same time, the vast body of prejudice research in young children indicates that they can recognise others different from them by colour and culture. The fact that young children can recognise differences in colour, ethnicity and culture is also important for the research about tolerance and acceptance of other who are different. Without such ability to recognise difference we cannot make any assumptions about tolerance either.

The research findings reviewed in the next two chapters summarise the findings about level of tolerance in six to seven-year olds and how they conceptualise tolerance towards others different in racial characteristics, ethnicity and nationality using similar methodology as described.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

Rivka T. WitenbergThe Psychology of ToleranceSpringerBriefs in Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3789-5_3

3. Tolerance of Six to Seven-Year-Old Children

Rivka T. Witenberg[1]

(1)

Independent Researcher, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Rivka T. Witenberg

Email: riwitenberg@outlook.com

3.1 Previous Research About Young Children: Background to the Research

What do children between the ages of six and seven years of age know about tolerance to human diversity? As suggested in the earlier chapters, what tolerance is and how to define it is rather difficult. Can young children aged between six and seven years conceptualise tolerance, make relevant judgements and justify them about others different from them? In other words, what are the reasoning patterns and underlying beliefs that children of that age use which guide their judgements and justifications in situations where they have to make a decision if something is right or wrong, good or bad?

The aim of the research presented in this chapter was to answer the following questions. Are young children aged between six and seven between able to reason and justify their judgements about tolerance and intolerance? This chapter deals with the kind of judgements they make in rejecting intolerance in favour of tolerance. Further, does contextual information embedded in the dilemma-like stories influence the decision making of six to seven years old children in regards to judgments and justification about others different from them. As described in chapter two, to be conceptually accessible to younger children the dilemma-like stories were adjusted and piloted to be age appropriate but story format and content remained the same as those used for the older participants. The protagonists in the three stories were people from Indigenous Australian, Asian and English backgrounds respectively in either school, shop or work settings. Participating school principals and Grade 1 coordinators helped to adjust the stories so that they were suitable for this age group. The essential difference in the stories was to place the protagonist in a situation with which the children were familiar, otherwise the stories remained exactly the same. For example, as six to seven-year olds do not receive grades or marks, lower marks were replaced by fewer stickers, which reflected the experience of children of this age group. Through the piloting process, it was found that the modified stories were suitable stimulus material for them. Most importantly, they were found to be useful in eliciting information about children’s tolerance judgements and their reasoning about their decisions, without eliciting any adverse effects. The young participants were questioned individually by skilled interviewers who were experienced in working with children.

Vogt (1997) suggests that a prerequisite for tolerance is the recognition of difference and diversity which exists between people. In other words, what do young children six to seven years of age understand and recognise differences about ethnicity, colour and other distinguishing characteristics? Aboud (1988) argues that researchers often fail to test whether children are in fact racially aware or more generally aware of difference between people. However, there is some research to indicate that children as young as five and six years of age are aware of others different from them and this awareness increases with age (Aboud, 1988). That young children are aware of differences is also supported by the findings of De Caroli and Sagone (2013) as described in the previous chapter.

According to Aboud (1988) the increased awareness of difference occurs over three phases. The most basic period involves the ability to recognise correctly and label others as belonging to a particular group such as Asians. At the next phase, perceptual maturity enables the child to classify others on the basis of phylogenetic information such as skin, hair colour and facial characteristics. A child who is developmentally at this phase can understand that Asian people often have straight black hair and different shaped eyes. More specifically, to be at this phase a child must also be able to perceive differences or dissimilarities between members of different groups. The first two phases are dependent on perceptual skills rather than necessarily cognitive skills. The last phase of awareness involves cognitive capacities to categorise individuals to specific racial or cultural groups (Aboud, 1988).

To examine whether the participants in her study aged six to seven were able to recognize difference and similarity, Chung-Voon (2002) utilised Aboud’s (1988) methodology with a group of students from this age group. She adopted The Picture Test from Doyle and Aboud (1995) of perceived similarity within and between groups in order to assess whether children between six and seven years of age were able to recognise ethnic markers. Specifically, it was aimed to assess their perception of within and between group differences. The pictures in this case consisted of two Caucasian faces (one male and one female), two Asian faces (male/female) and two Indigenous Australian faces (male/female) corresponding to the dilemma-like stories used in her research. The results showed that the young students perceived more similarities between people of the same background, (for example Asians) than between people of different backgrounds (say between people from Asian background and/or between Indigenous Australians and Caucasians). The findings indicate that the children were able to perceive within and between group differences and similarities. The implication that can be drawn from the findings is that Vogt’s (1997) prerequisite for being able to make judgements about acceptance of others who are different was met.

Unfortunately, getting access to young children to examine tolerance was not an easy process. Both schools and parents were reluctant to give permission for young children to participate in the studies. In spite of these difficulties, three studies were conducted highlighting the capability of this age group to reason about and justify their choices. They consisted of two unpublished studies which examined only six to seven-year olds (Chung-Voon, 2002; Hogan, 2002) and one published developmental study which included six to seven-year olds as part of a larger sample (Witenberg, 2007). Together these studies interviewed over 127 students from both the city of Melbourne and country Victoria in Australia. Two of the studies assessed firstly how young children make tolerant or intolerant judgements and secondly, examined the influence of context on their decision making (i.e., the three different stories) as well as the three behavioural dimensions of beliefs, speech and acts (Chung-Voon, 2002; Hogan, 2002). The kinds of justifications used to support a tolerant stance was assessed by both the Hogan (2002) and the Witenberg (2007) studies. All the participating students were aged between six and seven years. The Hogan (2002) study sample consisted of 50 first-graders (26 boys, 24 girls, M = 6 5) from one private and four government primary/elementary schools throughout metropolitan Melbourne. The Chung-Voon (2002) study sample consisted of 37 first-graders (18 boys, 19 girls, M = 6. 10) from one private and three government primary/elementary schools in the South-Eastern regions of metropolitan Melbourne. Finally, the Witenberg 2007 study consisted of 40 students of that age group (M = 6.5) with equal number of males and females. Students in this study attended schools either in the Melbourne metropolitan area or a rural township not far from Melbourne. Depending on the study between 44 and 65% of the participants were from Anglo-Saxon backgrounds and the remaining participants came from backgrounds such as Western, Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, Northern America, the Middle East and Africa. This is consistent with the cultural diversity of Australian society. However preliminary analysis indicated that diversity was not a significant factor which influenced the outcome.

3.2 The Global Nature of Tolerance in Young Children

Analysis of the data showed that the young participants, could understand the stories and the inherent conflict within them with some exceptions which is discussed later. While high levels of tolerance and acceptance were expressed, responses were not influenced by either between and within-subject variations. Firstly, no gender related differences emerged between the girls and the boys and secondly, the results showed that the children’s responses were global in nature. That is, the context of the three stories and the three behvioural dimensions did not influence their judgements. However, while responses were global they were also tolerant in nature with a tendency for the children to express a high level of tolerance towards other different from them (Chung-Voon, 2002; Hogan, 2002; Witenberg, 2007). For example, the results in the Hogan (2002) study indicated that significantly more children made tolerant judgements when presented with situations that could be responded to with either tolerance or intolerance. This applied to each of the three stories. Tolerant responses were used between 94 and 98% of the times. In the Witenberg (2007) study students aged between six and seven used tolerant judgements over 85% of the time. Similar findings were evident in Chung-Voon’s study (2001). In addition, no relationship between story contexts and tolerance judgments were found in any of the studies. Statistical analyses of the Hogan (2002) using a Friedman rank test revealed that the mean rank tolerance level did not differ significantly from one another across the three stories, indicating the story contexts did not influence level of tolerance. In other words, children at this age group were not influenced by the content of the different stories, whether the person was from an Indigenous, Asian or English background in either a school, shop or work settings. Similar findings were evident in Chung-Voon’s study (2002).

The analysis also showed that within-subject differences did not emerge in the way the three behavioural dimensions of holding prejudicial beliefs, speaking about them and acting on them influenced tolerance judgments. The three studies showed that the majority of children rejected the holding of, talking about, and acting on prejudicial beliefs for all three stories. This highlights the global nature of six to seven-year olds capacity to make judgements and justify their tolerance stance.

How the young students justified their tolerance stance was based mostly on appeal to fairness and very occasionally to empathy. Appeal to fairness and empathy is discussed in more details in Chap. 4 which deals with young children’s capacity to justify their tolerant stance. While responses were global they were also highly tolerant towards other in all the three studies (Chung-Voon, 2002; Hogan, 2002; Witenberg, 2007). However, when judgements were not coded as tolerant, they were usually irrelevant responses rather than prejudicial in nature. Irrelevant responses were particularly evident in the story about an English person in the work situation in the Hogan study, suggesting that the story was more challenging for the students than the other two stories. One of the possible explanations is that knowledge about the workplace is limited at this age.

In summary, the results indicate a global response pattern across both the three different story contexts and the three dimensions of beliefs, speech and act. While high levels of tolerance were expressed, responses were not influenced by either gender or within-subject variations of context and the dimensions of beliefs, speech and act.

These findings provide an insight into how young children reason about dilemma-like stories which can be resolved either with tolerance or intolerance. No variations in response patterns between the three contexts or behavioural dimensions emerged. Specifically, the data showed that six to seven-year olds tended to reject globally intolerance in favour of tolerance judgements and justifications based mostly on fairness. In other words, respondents in the studies expressed a very high level of tolerance towards others different from them in racial characteristics, ethnicity or nationality. The implication that can be drawn is that while young children are very tolerant they tend to conceptualise tolerance globally, irrespective of context or the behavioural dimensions. The global nature of the responses by the youngest participants indicates possible cognitive immaturity and a limited knowledge base. That young children think globally is supported by other studies which deal with political and belief discrepancy tolerance. As part of larger studies in Canada and the US, Helwig and colleagues (Helwig 1995, 1998; Helwig & Turiel, 2002; Neff & Helwig, 2002) found that when stimulus material was age appropriate children as young as six have a basic understanding of freedom of speech tolerance but developmentally they are only able to focus on one aspect of the problem. Further, belief discrepancy tolerance research also supports the contention that young children are able to make judgements about belief discrepancy tolerance but that judgements they made tended to be global in nature (Wainryb, Shaw, Laupa, & Smith, 2001). Research about both political and belief discrepancy tolerance is further discussed in Chap. 4.

These findings have implications for education which is discussed in Chap. 7. Generally, however, such findings are an encouragement for educators to foster further the underlying beliefs about tolerance and acceptance of difference and diversity.

3.3 The Influence of Cognitive Development on Tolerance

Why children of this age think globally can be best explained by theories which include cognitive developmental and Neo-Piagetian theories. Information processing theories and level of core knowledge can further explain the global nature of their thinking processes. There are a number of theories about children’s cognitive development that could explain the tendency for children to overlook contextual information when making their tolerance judgements. Cognitive developmental theories offer an insight into how the thinking capacities of children affect their reasoning in general as well as in particular situations such as socio-moral dilemmas about tolerance/intolerance. It is well recognised that Piaget’s theory (1965) explains the mechanisms and the stage-like processes that are essential for cognitive development. He suggests that six to seven-year olds lack the ability to focus on more than one dimension. According to Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory (Flavell, 1963, 1977; Piaget, 1965; Piaget & Inhelder, 1969), children aged six to seven are in the preoperational stage of development or are beginning to enter the concrete operational stage. Preoperational children’s thinking processes are said to be centred because children at this age “attend to and make judgements based upon the most salient aspect of their perceptual field” (Bjorklund, 1995, p. 75). At this stage of their development preoperational children are often unable to integrate various dimensions into a whole simultaneously. As a result, they centre only on a single dimension, even when two or more are relevant as it is in the case of the dilemma-like stories where context and dimensions were essentially overlooked. Interestingly, this is a stage where children begin to conceptualise right and wrong and where they also begin to embrace the concept of justice and fairness which emerged in the studies about tolerance. The development of fairness which is fundamental for both morality and tolerance is discussed in the next chapter. It can be argued that the children participating in this research are primarily in the preoperational stage of development or very early concrete operational stage and only focus on one dimension of the stimulus material, ignoring the context (i.e., English, Asian, Aboriginal) and behavioural dimensions (i.e., beliefs, speech, act). In contrast, older students take into consideration contextual information when reasoning about the same dilemmas. These findings are further discussed in Chap. 5.

Neo-Piagetian theories elaborate and extend Piaget’s work by proposing within-stage functions and strategies that enable the child to move from stage to stage. For example, Case (1992) proposed within-stage executive control functions which explain how individuals approach and resolve specific problems within their maturational level. Thus, the complexity of the task and their inexperience with dilemma conflicts may have taxed the young children’s reasoning processes. However, Johnson-Laird (2013) argues that Piaget underestimated children’s cognitive capacities and thus Information Processing theories offer another way of explaining the findings.

Information processing theories are built on a set of assumptions concerning how humans acquire, store, and retrieve information (Bjorklund, 1995, 2013; Flavell, 1977). In contrast to the Piagetian theory of cognitive development, Siegler (1996) suggests that children aged between six to seven years do have the ability to focus on more than one dimension. However, they exhibit a strong preference to focus only on a single dimension. Siegler (1996) further argues that the mechanisms that promote unidimensional reasoning in young children include processing capacity and encoding. Unfamiliar tasks such as socio-moral dilemmas tend to stress children’s processing limits so that although they do have the capacity to focus on more than one dimension, the effort required makes them less likely to do so. In addition, young children encode situations more narrowly than do older children. Consequently, their attention is focussed on the most salient dimension to the exclusion of others.

The conclusion that can be drawn from the literature is that young children have limited familiarity with dilemma-like stories and limited knowledge about the domain of tolerance and thus, are only able to focus on one dimension. In addition, the expressed desire to reject prejudice and embrace tolerance and acceptance is arguably the most salient aspect of their processing skills. Since children have limited encoding abilities they may only focus on this aspect of the stories whilst ignoring the different contexts and dimensions, resulting in global responding. However, expressing beliefs about fairness or rejection of unfair treatment of others is also developmentally salient and is discussed in more detail in Chap. 4. The information processing theories are not without criticism. One of the key problems is that these theories do not account for the processes that lead to developmental change.

An alternative explanation for young children’s global judgements could be their limited cognitive schemas. Schemas are “generalised collections of knowledge of past experiences which are organised into related knowledge groups and are used to guide our behaviours in familiar situations” (Nishida, 1999, p. 401). Our ability to reason is associated with processing and retrieving knowledge from a particular domain and, as mentioned previously, schemas are the basis by which this knowledge is organised. Thus, schemas play a major role in our ability to make inferences about particular situations (Bartlett, 1932). In the current findings, the contention is that one of the reasons children make such global judgements is because of their limited knowledge generally as well as limited experience about dilemma-like stories which can be resolved with either tolerance and intolerance. Children may activate their schema for pro-social beliefs and while they are able to recognise that someone is being treated unfairly and consequently they reject intolerance and discrimination in favour of tolerance. However, their limited experience and knowledge results in their overlooking the different contextual information and behavioural dimensions. This limitation is also relevant to the use of predominantly fairness as the dominant justification for tolerance at this age. The idea about fairness emerges around the age of four and is dominant in young children’s reasoning and thinking. This aspect of the findings will be further discussed in Chap. 4.

Usually, children’s knowledge of their surroundings and the world in general increases with age. There is no doubt that many aspects of cognitive development are qualitative in nature (Flavell, 1963, 1977; Piaget, 1965; Piaget & Inhelder, 1969), but quantitative changes in knowledge are also important in determining children’s cognitive development. Furthermore, age-related differences which have been found in various cognitive tasks can be credited to differences in level of knowledge. In problem solving tasks, the relationship between knowledge, mental effort and strategy use is acknowledged by researcher in the field (e.g, Kuhn, 2002). Considerable research has explored the role of knowledge by comparing the problem-solving characteristics of experts and novices. One robust finding is that the two groups categorise problems differently. While novices tend to categorise problems by the surface features in contrast experts tend to categorise them by the underlying principles. We know that children are universal novices in regard to their quantitative levels of knowledge (Chi, 2000; Chi & Ceci 1987; Spelke, & Kinzler, 2007), and that cognitive performance occurs within specific situations and contexts. The more familiar a person is with a specific situational context, the better is the performance. This is irrespective whether it is an adult or a child. Interestingly, research has shown that familiarity with a specific context can result in children performing at a very high level but within their maturational capacity. However, when children are presented with similar task which they are less familiar with, their performance tends to be less sophisticated because the use of strategies which require better knowledge base in a specific domain is not available to them.

3.4 Conclusion

The finding of the research about the capacity of children aged between six and seven years showed that there was a tendency to reject intolerance in favour of a tolerance stance. While the findings show that they are highly tolerant and accepting of others, their responses were not influenced by within subject difference. We found that neither the context of the stories nor the behavioural dimensions influenced their judgements. Gender did no show a significant difference between the girls and the boys response pattern.

Irrespective of the different theoretical perspectives, they all offer explanations to the limited capacity of younger children’s thinking and reasoning abilities. Cognitive developmental theories briefly reviewed here offer an insight into how the thinking capacities of children affect their judgements in general as well as in particular situations such as dilemma-like stories. Piaget (1965) suggests that six to seven-year olds lack the ability to focus on more than one dimension. Alternatively, Siegler (1996) suggests that children do have the ability to represent multiple dimensions, but use a unidimensional approach, as this is less taxing on their limited cognitive resources. Chi (2000) and others believe that developmental differences in the knowledge base are essential to our understanding of strategy development specifically and cognitive development more generally. With growing cognitive maturity children’s responses become more varied and this is evident in the reasoning process of older participants discussed further in Chap. 5.

By default, children of this age have limited experiences with socio-moral dilemma-like stories which require the coordination of two conflicting sides. These are skills they have limited experience with. From a knowledge perspective, they are novices and as such novices tend to categorise problems by the surface features. Focusing strategically on one side of the conflict favouring tolerance over intolerance is possibly contingent on their sense of fairness which emerges early in development.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

Rivka T. WitenbergThe Psychology of ToleranceSpringerBriefs in Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3789-5_4

4. Justifications Young Children Use

Rivka T. Witenberg[1]

(1)

Independent Researcher, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Rivka T. Witenberg

Email: riwitenberg@outlook.com

4.1 The Relationship Between Fairness (Justice) and Tolerance

Another important aspect about children’s tolerance judgements is whether they can support and justify their tolerant stance Kuhn argues that a person’s beliefs are the source from which decisions and judgements are made (1991, 2002). The question is, do young children hold underlying beliefs which they can call on to support their tolerant and intolerant judgements. As mentioned earlier there is a paucity of research about young children’s conceptualisation of tolerance and acceptance of others who are different. However, two studies (Hogan, 2002; Witenberg, 2007) have investigated the kind of justifications and underlying beliefs young children express in support of tolerance. The studies found that appeal to the principle of fairness predominated their responses with occasional appeal to empathy. The specific justifications the children used provides an insight into their underlying thoughts and beliefs about tolerance and intolerance, corresponding with their age-related cognitive abilities and knowledge. More specifically, the majority of children supported their tolerance stance with appeal to the principle of fairness with responses such as “it’s not fair to do that to black people” or more generally that “It’s not fair” or “It is unfair to do this”. Although lacking any form of elaboration appealing to fairness was one of the most commonly used justifications for rejection intolerance and embracing tolerance and acceptance. Less often, the children appealed to empathy with expressions such as “I feel sorry for him/them” and very occasionally used irrelevant justifications which suggested they had not fully understood the story or what it was asked of them. This was particularly evident in regard to the English story in the work situation as described earlier.

Overall, the Hogan (2002) study established that the preferred justification to support tolerance was the dislike of unfairness and the desire to treat others with fairness for all three behavioural dimensions of holding prejudicial beliefs, talking about them and acting on them. In this study the children appealed to the principle of fairness significantly more often than they appealed to empathy. Across the three stories they appealed to fairness 75% of the time, while empathy was only appealed to 30% of the time. However, often both justifications were used together. In this case, if both the fairness and empathy justifications are taken into account, tolerance was affirmed 82% of the time across the three stories. Similarly, the Witenberg (2007) study also found that, appealing to the principle of fairness was used across the three age groups participating in the study. However, it was also clear that six to seven-year olds used appeals to the principle of fairness more often than the other two groups, indicating a possible developmental trend specific to this age group. Of all the six to seven-year olds, 84.2% appealed to fairness and 15% appealed to fairness and empathy in equal measures with expressions such as “it’s not fair and how would you feel”. The implication is that the young children were averse to others being treated unfairly and were also able to empathise at times with the plight of the protagonists in the stories. While irrelevant responses emerged mostly in the English story no intolerant underlying beliefs were evident with the young children in either studies. The implication is that young children prefer treating others with fairness which has important consequences for the education about tolerance.

Parenthetically, in neither study did the young participants appeal to reason or logic which was evident in the older participants suggesting that they were not developmentally ready for more complex level of reasoning. Further, empathy emerged as a significant justification with older participants, particularly with females and so did reason and logic which was favoured by males. These findings are discussed in more detail in Chap. 6.

By their inherent nature, conflicts can only be resolved through a decision or a judgement (Hart & Killen, 1995) where the individual takes a stance in favour of one or the other of the two propositions, in this case presented in the stories. Towards the end of the preoperational stage children of this age are beginning to take another person’s point of view with regards to what they think and what they possibly feel. The findings show that the majority of the participating children were able to engage with the dilemmas and were able to endorse tolerance by using a set of beliefs across the three stories to support their stance. However, as discussed earlier, children aged between six and seven years tended to respond globally and nearly always endorsed a tolerance stance (Chung-Voon, 2002; Hogan, 2002) which they justified with appeal to fairness and occasionally empathy (Hogan, 2002; Witenberg 2007). Significantly, the young participants rarely disaffirmed tolerance, rather they tended to make irrelevant responses to the questions asked mostly for the English story but occasionally for the other two as well. In spite of the piloting and careful preparation of the stories, the English story in the work situation generated 38% of irrelevant justifications in the Hogan (2002) study, most likely reflecting the young children’s limited experiences in the work place. The English story was about a discriminatory event at work and possibly the least familiar to the children. Indeed, they appeared to have had more difficulties in conceptualising this dilemma in comparison the other two stories and therefore they used more irrelevant justifications. Clearly, the limited experience of some of the young student with the workplace context resulted in such responses.

Tolerant justifications based on underlying beliefs about treating other with fairness can be best explained by the emergence of young children’s understanding of equity and fairness. Appeal to fairness is most likely strongly related to prosocial and moral development. What these studies indicate is that the children participating viewed holding beliefs which were prejudicial in nature, talking about such beliefs or causing harm through differential treatment of others through exclusion or rejection as a moral concern. Importantly, the pilot studies did show that the responses children gave were self-generated as fairness (and tolerance for that matter) were never mentioned in the stimulus material or in the briefing before the study commenced. In spite of the small sample we can be confident to some degree that children between six and seven years of age appeal spontaneously to fairness and reject unfair behaviours towards others different from them.

There is a body of research that indicates that children of this age can differentiate between right and wrong, moral and immoral issues. Not only can they differentiate between the two, like adolescents and adults, they view moral transgressions as wrong and grave (Goodwin & Darley, 2008; Nucci & Turiel, 2000; Smetana, 1983; Turiel, 1998; Wainryb, Shaw, Langley, Cottam, & Lewis, 2004; Wright, 2011). Treating others unfairly is clearly viewed as wrong and unacceptable.

4.2 The Emergence of Fairness in Young Children

An important question is how does the belief in fairness emerge? Is it an innate quality or does it develop in our interaction with others? Fairness most likely develops as an interaction between nature and nurture or more specifically it is contingent on genetics and socio-cultural influence (Fehr & Rockenbach, 2003; Liu & Lu, 2016). Scientists including neuro-economists now believe that the evolution of fairness is closely related to cooperation, reciprocity and altruism and is universal in nature (Brosnan & de Waal, 2014; Liu & Lu, 2016). Cooperation, reciprocity and altruism are also important aspects of tolerance.

Based on theories of social cognition, Fiske (1991) argues that fairness becomes salient at about the age of four and is generalised to social issues due to the maturation process leading to the externalisation of innate cognitive models. Cognitive models, whether innate or acquired, imply a theory about a fair world. Fairness is essential for unselfish behaviour, human cooperation and sharing with others. It appears that fairness is common in almost all societies and cultures.

A study by Blake et al. (2015) examined the emergence of fairness in seven culturally diverse countries ranging from villages in countries with subsistence economies to large industrial cities and wealthy countries (i.e., Canada, India, Peru, Senegal, Uganda and USA). In this study, a variety of religions were also appraised including Christian dominations, Hinduism and Islam. The findings showed that while fairness emerges during childhood in all the countries under investigation, the developmental trajectory varied as a function of country and culture. Yet the use of fairness did emerge in all the countries overriding local norms. The implication from such findings is that fairness and equity are an essential developmental aspect in human societies so that cooperation enables successful outcomes.

The philosopher John Rawls in both his books A Theory of Justice and Justice and Fairness: A Restatement argues that justice is essentially for fairness (Rawls, 1971, 2001). In psychological studies about moral development the concept of fairness and justice are considered to be important aspects of moral development. In fact, older and well-established theories such as those of Piaget (1965) and Kohlberg (1981, 1984) have established a fundamental understanding of the development of morality in children based on fairness and justice contingent on cognitive development. More recent moral psychological theories argue that morality has five basic foundations or innate intuitions and that fairness, reciprocity and justice are one of the five (Haidt, 2013; Haidt & Graham, 2007). Interestingly, evolutionary biology and behavioural economics also pay a great deal of attention to understanding the origin and development of fairness related to cooperation.

Research findings from these two disciplines show that there is a strong dislike for inequity and a strong wish for fairness, even in young children. According to Fehr and Fishbacher (2003) there is now a large body of research evidence based on psychological studies and experimental economics that suggests that there is a strong tendency for people to prefer both that others should be treated fairly as well as that there should be reciprocity between individuals. Indeed, psychological research has shown that children as young as five distributed stickers equally to pretend friends (Lane & Coon, 1972). Further, Damon (1975) also found that five-year-old children were concerned with equality when resolving hypothetical dilemmas. Yet studies in behavioural economics show that desire or preference for equal distribution did not appear to emerge before seven years of age. Fehr and colleagues (Fehr, Bernhard, & Rockenbach, 2008) found that children’s distribution of equity increased with age. It was least evident in three to four-year-old children who tended to behave selfishly whilst nearly all seven to eight-year olds preferred equal distribution of resources. In summary, it appears that the preference to be equitable develops from six or between six and seven and this preference increases with age (Fehr, Bernhard, & Rockenbach, 2008; Shaw et al., 2014).

However, there is psychological research data that challenges the findings of behavioural economics about the development of fairness. For example, Sommerville, Schmidt, Yun, & Burns, (2013) suggests that infants as young as 19 months paid more attention to the distribution of items based on their preferential looking time. Specifically, Sommerville and her colleagues (2013) found that there was a tendency for infants to look longer when the distribution of items was unequal in comparison to equal distribution. There is also some empirical evidence to suggest that three to four-year-old children do notice inequality in distribution suggesting that they have knowledge of fairness before they apply it (Blake, McAuliffe, & Warneken 2014). However, the evidence is inconclusive and research into the ontology of the development of fairness needs further investigation.

Differences in findings could be contingent on the research methodology employed. While many studies use surveys, questionnaires or at times dilemma-like stories, alternative approaches examine the concept of fairness through preferential looking time and fair distribution methodology. In survey and questionnaire methodology conceptual and cognitive understanding of fairness is essential while preferential looking time and fair distribution methodology results depend on visual and perceptual recognition. These differences in methodology could account for the differences in the data. In the case of the tolerance research, the dilemma-like stories require some cognitive maturity as the concept of fairness and unfairness were self-generated by the children, even if it was only on an intuitive level for some of them.

Although in its infancy neuro-psychological and neuro-economic research has also examined the emergence and the ontology of fairness. These studies investigate the relationship between factors influencing brain activities and moral issues. The results provide some insight about fairness which is also clearly implicated in tolerance. For example, a study by Hsu and colleagues (2008) which used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate distributive justice (fairness) about allocating money for children in orphanages. The research established that inequality aversion was found to be associated with the anterior insular cortex which is also significantly related to morality. Interestingly, judgments about fairness were also associated with anterior insular cortex (see for example, Singer, 2006).

The appeal to fairness in the studies about tolerance shows that even young children view tolerance to human diversity more than simply endurance or “putting up with”. It is and it becomes a moral and civic obligation between people where “… the principle of fairness or impartiality is absolutely fundamental to any coherent moral philosophy” (Barrow, 2001, p. 237). Fairness, it has been argued, is one of the most important aspects of moral development and moral psychology. Older theories such as those of Piaget and Kohlberg centre fairness (justice) as a principle element in the early development of children’s moral understanding and behaviour. More contemporary researchers in the field place fairness as the major foundation for morality and consider fairness to be the most likely basis of human cooperation. The use of the underlying beliefs that others should be treated fairly and empathetically does indicate overlapping relationships with moral reasoning.

4.3 Conclusion

Using dilemma-like stories that could be resolved with either tolerance or intolerance, the data showed that the young children favoured tolerance over intolerance. However, younger reasoners encode a situation more narrowly and tend to focus on the most salient issue when resolving socio-moral dilemmas, often disregarding the complexity of the problem. Their judgements and justifications tend to be global in nature. Further the data showed that fairness is the most favoured justification followed very occasionally by empathy and at times with irrelevant justifications. Moral development is also closely related to fairness and empathy suggesting that tolerance is more than simply the opposite of prejudice. Harnessing young children’s strong beliefs in both fairness and empathy for others should underpin the teaching of tolerance in primary/elementary schools. Implications for education is discussed in the final chapter of the book.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

Rivka T. WitenbergThe Psychology of ToleranceSpringerBriefs in Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3789-5_5

5. The Expressions of Tolerance (Intolerance) Beyond the Age of Seven

Rivka T. Witenberg[1]

(1)

Independent Researcher, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Rivka T. Witenberg

Email: riwitenberg@outlook.com

5.1 Introduction to More Mature Trajectories

Both belief discrepancy and political tolerance reviewed earlier help us to understand specific aspects of tolerance. What this research does not cover is tolerance to human diversity more generally, its developmental trajectory, and how it is conceptualised with particular emphasis on reasoning, judgements and justifications. As discussed in the introductory chapter, the starting point for this research was the assumption that tolerance to human diversity is not simply the absence of prejudice but that it is a separate construct best placed within the moral domain and which is worth serious consideration from a psycho-developmental perspective. Several studies were conducted in Australia and one in Israel using the method described in Chap. 1 in order to better understand how contextual factors of story contents and the behavioural dimensions of beliefs, speech and acts influenced tolerance in participants beyond the age of seven. How age-and gender-related differences affected the conceptualisation and development of tolerance was also examined.

As discussed in Chap. 1, in developmental psychology, particularly in the pro-social and moral domains, there is a tradition to explore the way children, adolescents and young adults reason about and justify their views in order to understand the underlying rationale behind their judgements. Typically, such a methodology maps children’s, adolescents’ and young adults’ reasoning and judgements, using stories or dilemmas that present a character with conflicting events requiring resolution (Dunn et al. 2000; Haidt 2001; Kohlberg, 1981, 1984; Piaget 1932/1965; Schnall et al. 2008). This is a particularly important aspect of people’s tolerant judgements and whether they can reason about and/or justify their tolerant stance. While a child may score highly on a particular tolerance scale, his or her reasoning for such a stance is not explicit and may have little to do with tolerance. This was evident in the studies of the six to seven-year olds who at times used irrelevant justifications. The same argument could be advanced for adolescents and even young adults. Thus, examining the underlying reasoning process is essential for a better insight into how tolerance to human diversity emerges, develops and is supported.

Chapters 3 and 4 reviewed level of tolerance in young children and also discussed the kind of justifications they use to support tolerance. We found that young children were highly tolerant and that the belief in fairness was the most commonly used justification, with appeal to empathy used a lot less often to support a tolerant stance. The following two chapters review the response patterns of judgements and justification of participants aged between 11 and 24 years in Australia and nine to 24 in Israel using the method described in Chap. 1. The aim of these studies, was to understand how tolerance was conceptualised and what factors influenced tolerance in a similar manner to the one examining the responses of the younger students. How story context, behavioural dimensions, age and gender influenced tolerance judgements and justifications were assessed. Within-and between-subject differences emerged with the findings of all the studies generally similar in nature.

5.2 Pattern of Responses for Level of Tolerance in Older Participants

As suggested earlier, one of the questions this research wished to answer was the pattern of responses that older students aged between 11 to 24 years of age in Australia (Neale, 2002; Thomas & Witenberg, 2004; Witenberg & Mcdowall, 2001; Witenberg, 2002a, b, 2007) and 9–24 years of age in Israel (Witenberg & Cinamon, 2006; Witenberg, Cinamon, & Iram, 2003) made to culture specific stories that could be resolved using either a tolerant or an intolerant stance.

In regards to the overall pattern of tolerant responses, all the studies confirmed that participating students in both the Australian and the Israeli studies rejected prejudice and intolerance and embraced a tolerance stance between 70 and 80% of the time based on tolerant (a score of three) or very tolerant scores (a score of four) on the 4-point rating scale described in the Method section. For example, a study by Witenberg in 2002a with students aged between 11 to 22 years of age established a very high level of tolerance towards others different from them in colour, ethnicity or culture as described in the stories. Analysis of students’ overall judgement scores showed that 77.3% of the participants expressed high level of tolerance toward others who are different. Another study by one of my students established high level of tolerance for students aged between 18 and 25 years. What this study found is that up to 85% of the sample expressed high levels of tolerance (Roga, 2006). Similar findings were evident in the Israeli study (Witenberg & Cinamon, 2006), with majority of the students rejecting prejudice and discrimination in favour of high level of tolerance. The conclusion that can be drawn from these studies is that level of tolerance is generally high among Australian and Israeli young people.

The high level of tolerance and acceptance expressed of others different from them was somewhat surprising initially because of the strong emphasis placed on psychological research and in the media about prejudice. In fact, the results about level of tolerance found in these studies reviewed here are congruent with studies which examine prejudice. Precise figures about the percentage of the population who are prejudiced are difficult to ascertain (Ponterotto & Pedersen, 1993). However, Pettigrew (1980) has suggested that in the US, about 15% of white adults are extremely prejudiced toward blacks. More generally, studies indicate that about 10–30% of the population in most liberal democracies is prejudiced (often moderately) toward a specific group. For example, a 2003 study conducted in Italy revealed that between 18 and 22% of Italians did not think that Jewish people were “fully-fledged” Italians (Luconi, 2004). Another study surveying 1700 adults throughout England found that up to 36% of the sample expressed prejudice against specific groups, usually ethnic minorities (Valentine & McDonald, 2004). When it comes to children, similar findings emerge, although such findings should be considered with caution as expression of prejudice may reflect children’s perceptual and cognitive limitations. Nevertheless, there are studies which examine young children’s attitudes of others different from them. For example, research about racial attitudes of black children between the ages of three and eight years found that 27% of the samples expressed in-group preferences and negative attitudes toward white people (Aboud, 1988). Taking this into account, there is still clearly a substantial proportion of a given population usually in liberal democracies that may not hold negative attitudes and beliefs toward others who are different from them in racial characteristics ethnicity or culture and other distinguishing differences. This is not necessarily true for none democratic states which encourage prejudice towards diversity. There is research centered around amygdala activation that shows that prejudice could be innate but it also shows that the environmental factors cannot be ignored (e.g., Hart et al., 2000; Phelps et al., 2000). The amygdala activation could be about recognizing differences such as black/white but environmental impute is about learning from family, schools, society and others who influence our likes and dislikes and the way we view the world.

In fact, cluster analysis of the data for the Witenberg, 2002a study, with the aim of identifying distinct groups of respondents, found that up to one-half of the sample, including up to one-third of young adults (18–22 years), consistently made tolerant to very tolerant judgements, regardless of the contextual information embedded in the different dilemma-like stories. That is, half of the younger students and one third of the older ones were globally tolerant. While tolerance and intolerance do coexist which is also confirmed by the research about political and belief-discrepancy tolerance studies (Helwig, 1998; Wainryb et al., 1998, 2001), findings from the cluster analysis support the contention that some individuals are consistently tolerant, irrespective to whom and under what circumstances they are asked to extend their tolerance, at least on an explicit level. It is also debatable that older participants were limited by their cognitive abilities as the six to seven-year-old children were when responding to the stimulus material.

5.3 The Effect of Story Content on Tolerance

However, tolerance was also found to be contextual in nature and level of tolerance depends to a degree on whom and what we are asked to tolerate. Overall, the data did show that story context did indeed influence the responses of tolerance in all the studies apart from the Thomas and Witenberg (2004) study. For example, in one of the early studies, we asked 11–12 and 15–16-year-old students to make judgements about people from Indigenous Australian, Asian or English backgrounds (Witenberg & Mcdowall, 2001). Analysis of students’ overall judgement scores showed that 83% of the participants expressed tolerance towards Indigenous Australians but the same level of tolerance was not extended toward people from Asian or even those from English backgrounds. Up to 74% of the participants expressed tolerance toward people from Asian backgrounds but surprisingly only 62% expressed this level of tolerance toward people from English backgrounds. This was the only low result and rather surprising considering that the dominant culture in Australia is Anglo-Celtic. Age and gender related differences may have influenced this finding which is discussed later in this chapter. Analysis also showed that level of tolerance on any one of the stories was independent of level of tolerance of any of the other two stories. That is, tolerance was found to be contextual in nature and level of tolerance depends on whom and what we are asked to tolerate and accept.

In the Witenberg (2002b) study, within-subject analysis of variance (ANOVA) found a main effect for story content. Students were most tolerant when the subject of the story was a person from an Indigenous Aboriginal background in the school situation and least tolerant when the person was from an English background in the work situation. The Israeli study (Witenberg & Cinamon, 2006) which also used within-subject analysis of variance (ANOVA) to analyse the data, also found a main effect for story content. Students extended the greatest tolerance to a person from Ethiopian background in the swimming pool situation and the least tolerance to an Israeli in the restaurant situation. These findings support the hypothesis that contextual cues influence tolerance judgements with increased cognitive maturity. In other words, participants reflected on the contextual information embedded in the stories which influenced level of tolerance for the individual stories. That story content influences judgements is also evident in studies in the moral domain (e.g., Haidt, 2013; Kohlberg, 1981, 1984). For example, a study examining situational factors that affect moral reasoning utilised different versions of negative consequences to Heinz in the Heinz dilemma adopted from Kohlberg’s work found that manipulation of contextual information influenced moral judgements (Sobesky, 1983).

However, story context did not always influence tolerant judgements in our studies. Examination of the data in the Thomas and Witenberg (2004) study found no statistical difference in the responses for the three stories. Specifically, the analysis showed that 79% of students responded with tolerant judgments for the Indigenous Australian story, 76.2% for the English story and 77.6% for the Asian story. The analysis also showed that level of tolerance on any one of the stories was not independent of level of tolerance of any of the other two stories. Although the protagonists in the stories were the same as in the previous research, the stories themselves were modified in nature in that all three stories involved some form of exclusion. The oxford dictionary defines exclusion as “the act of not allowing someone or something to take part in an activity or to enter a place”. Studies about rejection using neuroimaging “suggests that social pain is analogous in its neurocognitive function to physical pain” (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003, p. 292). Therefore, one plausible explanation for the lack of context effect may simply be that all three dilemma stories in this study dealt with exclusion and that it was the situation not the person that determined the kind of judgements made. The content of each story was about excluding a person from either living in a street, getting work or joining a sports club. The stories may have evoked a global idea or impression which reflected the participating students’ experiences and knowledge about being excluded or excluding others, overriding more specific person-situation aspects. A study described next explored this relationship.

5.4 Person-Situation Relationships

The studies reviewed above, apart from the Thomas and Witenberg (2004) study, established that the story contexts did influence judgements. To better understand whether the participants reacted to the person, the situation or the interaction of a person in a situation when making tolerant or intolerant judgments, an earlier study by one of my students (Guadagno, 2002) was designed to separate person-situation relationships and helps to sheds some understanding about the complex nature of tolerance judgements. Using the same stories as the Witenberg (2002a) study, this research aimed to help unpack the theoretical underpinning of whether the person or the situation variables influence responses to tolerance and more specifically to investigate which component of the stimulus material influenced individual’s judgements. The first set of analyses revealed that the school context always resulted in higher levels of tolerance irrespective of whom the protagonist in the story was, which explains the findings in the Witenberg and McDowall (2001) and Witenberg (2002a, b) research. Kruskal-Wallis analyses further revealed no significant differences of whom the person (Indigenous Australian, Asian or English) was but rather where the person was located in the specific situational context of either shop, school or work. It appears that person-situation pairing did not influence level of tolerance but rather the context itself in which the person was situated influenced the judgements that were made. Overall, levels of tolerance expressed by students aged between 14 and 22 years (which was generally high as in the other studies) were determined by the situational context in which the event occurs rather than on the colour, ethnicity or culture the of the person located in the contextual situation of either school, shop and work. Interestingly, students expressed the highest appeal to tolerance in the school situation irrespective of the person in the story with the corollary that they disproved strongly of a teacher’s discriminatory behaviour against any student regardless of colour, ethnicity or nationality. For the school context, the level of tolerance was highest regardless of whom the person was in the story in contrast to the other two contexts of shop and work which were not as high.

A plausible explanation is grounded in the observation that most of the students scored high on tolerance which suggests that whom the person was in the story, was not pertinent to their decision-making. Instead students’ attention was drawn to the inequitable situation. Being treated unfairly at school by a teacher appears to be most relevant to their own experiences, rather than the specific person being discriminated against, which perhaps less tolerant people may focus on. Analysis of participants’ justifications for the intolerant responses did indicate that this conclusion has some plausible evidence. Students who expressed intolerant justifications referred more often to the characteristics of the person than to the inequitable situation. In fact, these participants referred twice as often to the racial/ethnic characteristics of the person than the inequitable situation. The tentative implication from this data is that tolerant and intolerant people focusing on different aspects of a situation. To tolerant people injustice and unfairness are more cognitively salient while an intolerant individual focus on the racial/ethnic differences. This is a very interesting finding which is rarely considered in the literature and which needs further research to unravel person-situation relationships in regards to tolerance to human diversity.

5.5 The Effect of the Behavioural Dimensions on Tolerance

Another question that this research aimed to assess was whether the three behavioural dimensions of holding prejudiced beliefs, expressing them openly and acting on them influenced patterns of responses in the older students. What the overall findings showed is that behaviours the students were asked to tolerate determined their responses. In all cases, students rejected holding prejudicial beliefs and acting on them considerably more often that speaking about them.

For example, in the Witenberg (2002a) study, within-subjects analysis revealed the significance of the three behavioural dimensions. Using the Greenhouse-Geisser 8 adjustment, the analysis revealed a significant effect of dimensions. Overall, only 3.5% of the students accepted acting with intolerance towards others different from them such as serving an Asian person last because Asian do not belong in Australia. Further, only 3.7% accepted holding prejudicial beliefs, while, 30.1% of students, mostly 18–22 year-olds, believed it was acceptable to openly and freely express discriminatory beliefs. In other words, acting with intolerance was almost never acceptable, followed by holding intolerant beliefs. Yet surprisingly, speaking about such beliefs was more often acceptable. Further, while we did not find that story context in the Thomas and Witenberg (2004) study influenced tolerance judgements, the behavioural dimensions of holding prejudicial beliefs, speaking about them and acting on them did. Here 92% of students rejected acting intolerantly or discriminating against others more often than either holding such beliefs or talking about them. Specifically, 74.2% of the students rejected holding prejudicial beliefs and 63.4 rejected speaking openly to others about such beliefs. Once again, the least acceptable behaviour was acting on prejudicial ideas. The Israeli data confirmed the contextual nature of tolerance. Students endorsed least often discriminatory acts, with 89% of the students considered such actions as unacceptable. In comparison, speaking to others about such beliefs was considered unacceptable by 66% of the students, with only 60% of the students regarded holding such beliefs as unacceptable. In other words, only 11% of the Israeli students found discriminatory acts as tolerable while holding such beliefs was acceptable by 40% of the students.

As part of a larger study, Butrus (2006) another of my students tested the hypothesis that discriminatory acts would be less accepted than intolerant beliefs or speech with a group of younger and older adults. The younger adults had a mean age of 20 years and the older adults had a mean age of 30 years. Bonferroni pairwise comparisons indicated a significant difference between the belief and act dimensions and between the speech and act dimensions. A significant difference was also observed between the belief and speech dimensions. As expected, intolerant acts were least accepted compared to holding prejudicial beliefs or talking about such beliefs (Butrus, 2006).

In all the studies involving the older students, where the relationship was tested for the effect of behavioural dimensions on tolerance, the participants rejected acting on prejudicial beliefs considerably more often that speaking about them. Secondly, they rejected holding prejudicial beliefs more often than speaking about them (Butrus, 2006; Neale, 2002; Roga, 2006; Thomas & Witenberg, 2004; Witenberg 2002a, b; Witenberg & Cinamon, 2006). In some instances, the most acceptable behaviour was holding prejudicial beliefs as holding such beliefs did not harm anyone (e.g., Butrus, 2006; Roga, 2006). In other studies, speaking about prejudicial or intolerant beliefs was most acceptable because we have free speech in this country. (e.g., Neale, 2002; Thomas & Witenberg, 2004, 2002a; Witenberg & Cinamon, 2006). Least acceptable was discriminatory acts for all the studies without exceptions. One explanation is that the consequences for intolerant actions can be greater than those for intolerant beliefs and speech. Based on the justifications participants gave for rejection intolerant acts, there was a general recognition that discriminatory acts are both harmful and hurtful. Participants clearly adjusted their tolerance or acceptance in accordance with the relative harm that prejudicial beliefs, speech or acts could cause and judged that holding such beliefs and speaking out about was less harmful than acting on them. These findings are consistent with previous research about belief discrepancy tolerance that indicate that discrepant acts were least acceptable than speaking about them or holding such beliefs (Gieling, Thijs, & Verkuyten, 2010; Sigelman & Toebben, 1992; Verkuyten & Slooter, 2008; Wainryb et al., 1998, 2001, 2004. See also Chap. 2 which reviews previous research).

Together the conclusion that can be drawn is that participants in any of the studies clearly adjusted their tolerance or acceptance in accordance with the relative harm that intolerant or dissenting beliefs, speech or acts could cause. They judged that acting on such beliefs was more harmful than holding prejudicial beliefs or speaking about them. This also suggests that tolerance appears to emerge after a conscious process of deliberation, given that participants in all the studies whether tolerance to human diversity or belief-discrepancy tolerance weighed a number of factors in making their judgments about how acceptable it is to hold intolerant or disagreeable beliefs, speaking about them or acting on them. This suggest a developmental progression as responses of the six to seven-year-old students, reasoning and decision making were global in nature.

5.6 The Influence of Age and Gender

However, the process is more complex as significant effects emerged for age and gender on tolerance judgement in both the Australian and Israeli studies. In other words, level of tolerance was influenced by both the age of the participants and whether they were male or female. Between-subject analyses in the Australian studies indicated a significant effect of age on level of tolerance for both the stories themselves and the behavioural dimensions of holding prejudicial beliefs, speaking about them and acting on them (e.g. Thomas & Witenberg, 2004; Witenberg, 2002b; Witenberg et al., 2003). Almost as often as the six to seven-year-olds, there was a tendency for the 11 to 12-year-olds to strongly reject intolerance in all the three different stories and the three behaviours to support a tolerant stance. On the other hand, when intolerance was expressed it was more prevalent in the responses of the older age groups, particularly in the speech dimension. Gender was significantly related to tolerance judgements with females expressing more tolerance overall. When both age and gender were considered, the least tolerant were 15 to 16-year-old males (e.g., Witenberg, 2002b). The kind of justifications students used which is discussed in the next chapter helps to explain the age and gender related differences.

Similar to the Australian studies, the Israeli study’s data (Witenberg et al., 2003; Witenberg & Cinamon, 2005, 2006) supports between-and within-subject differences about age and gender. Overall younger students expressed more tolerant judgements in comparison to the older students. Beyond these age-related patterns, gender-related differences emerged, particularly an overall tendency for females to be more tolerant than males. The findings also showed that young adolescent males, at approximately 14 to 16 years of age, tended to be more intolerant than females of that age and also more intolerant than older and younger males and females. Interestingly, although using a different methodology, a longitudinal study with 13 to 28-year-olds Swedish students which examined acceptance of immigrants to Sweden found that males 13 years of age were least accepting of immigrants or least “tolerant.” However, the study also found that acceptance of immigrants increased with age (Lundberg & Abdelzadeh, 2017). Why males of this age are least tolerant and accepting of others different from them needs further research.

Whilst age-related differences were anticipated which could be indicative of possible developmental trends similar to moral development, gender differences were not. However, there is a substantial body of research which indicates that gender differences influence outcomes in the moral domain (e.g. Gilligan, 1983; Gilligan & Attanucci, 1988; Fumagalli et al., 2010. See also Chap. 6 for further discussion about gender differences).

5.7 Conclusion

The preceding studies established at least tentatively that tolerance has its own unique developmental trajectory which is mediated by contextual factors, age and gender. The data shows that story context, apart from one study (Thomas & Witenberg, 2004), was a significant factor in determined level of tolerance. However, the Guadagno (2002) study confounded the findings by establishing that the inequitable situation rather than the person determined level of tolerance expressed. Those expressing a tolerant stance were more inclined to focus on the inequitable situation and those participants expressing prejudicial and discriminatory ideas and values tended to focus on the person. This may also explain the Thomas and Witenberg study where all three stories dealt with exclusion. While further research is required to unpack the relationship of person/situation, there are strong indications that contextual information such as to whom and under what circumstances tolerance is extended influences tolerance judgements.

Consistent with Wainryb and her colleagues’ (1998) findings about belief discrepancy tolerance, the data also demonstrated that what behavioural dimensions participants were asked to tolerate also affected the judgments made. That is, holding prejudicial beliefs and talking about them resulted in different judgements. Least accepted were discriminatory or intolerant acts because of the harm such actions may cause. However, more variability in tolerance judgements were found within the belief and speech dimensions where some participants accepted holding prejudicial beliefs and at times talking about them more readily than acting on them because the perceived harm each could cause. Together these studies suggest that tolerance to human diversity appears to emerge after a conscious process of deliberation, given that participants seemed to weigh different factors in making their judgments.

Verkuyten and Slooter (2007) also found that their students’ acceptance was in accordance with the relative harm that dissenting beliefs, speech or acts could cause. Overall, the data shows that believing in and talking about prejudicial beliefs are more accepted at times than acting on such beliefs. Although intolerant acts are clearly harmful, it is debatable as to whether or not intolerant beliefs or speech carry the same level of harm (Witenberg, 2007; Thomas & Witenberg, 2004). Further, gender was significantly related to tolerance judgements with females expressing more tolerance overall. Least tolerant were 13 and 16-year old males and this finding was supported by both the Israeli study and the studies conducted in Australia.

Taken together, these findings suggested that tolerance is multifaceted and a complex process which is not simply the opposite of prejudice. It deserves further research effort if we are to understand factors influencing tolerance to human diversity and the implication for education. Research needs to be both general in nature and particularly focusing on how we conceptualise tolerance, how we make judgements and justify them.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

Rivka T. WitenbergThe Psychology of ToleranceSpringerBriefs in Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3789-5_6

6. More About Tolerance Justifications

Rivka T. Witenberg[1]

(1)

Independent Researcher, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Rivka T. Witenberg

Email: riwitenberg@outlook.com

6.1 Fairness Empathy and Reason

Another aim of this research was to examine the kind of justifications the older participants use to support their tolerant stance. How tolerance is justified is very rarely examined in the psychological literature. However, as suggested earlier justifications offer an understanding of how tolerance is conceptualised as well as providing insight about ways tolerance can be promoted and protected. How younger students aged between six and seven justified their choices was reviewed in Chap. 4. This chapter deals with the responses of older participants between the ages of 11 and 25 in Australia depending on the specific study in question and nine to 24 in the Israeli study. In addition, the responses of adults with the average age of 30 years also influenced the overall findings.

While it is important to know whether young people are tolerant or not, how they reason about taking a tolerant (or intolerant) stance is equally important, as it was with the youngest students. Understanding what underlying beliefs are involved in promoting or subordinating tolerance has both theoretical and educational implications. Our belief system guides our reasoning and decision-making about sociomoral or moral issues (Goldman, 2002). Decisions and judgements are made on the basis of personal beliefs (Kuhn, 1991) because they are used as a personal yardstick. Beliefs are acquired and can be changed (Colby & Damon, 1995) but they do usually imply a personal stance, rather than a chance conviction (Goldman, 2002). Believing therefore, is an intellectual judgement, which involves a specific conviction. By implication, holding favourable and/or unfavourable attitudes and beliefs toward others, who are different from us in racial characteristics, ethnicity, colour, creed and nationality, influences our judgements and justifications.

Marcus and colleagues argue that decisions about political tolerance, and therefore, by inference tolerance to human diversity, are influenced by both predispositions and standing decisions (Marcus, Sullivan, Thiess-Morse, & Wood, 1995; Marcus, Sullivan, Thiess-Morse, & Stevens, 2005). Both come under the umbrella of antecedent considerations which, “are the entire class of long-term influences that have long lived effects… on the judgements people make” (Marcus et al., 1995, p. 19). Predispositions are deeply rooted and stable individual characteristics which result in generalised tendencies to think, feel and behave in certain ways (Butrus & Witenberg, 2015). The influence of predispositions on tolerance is reviewed later in this chapter as is the relationship between personality variables and tolerance. In contrast to predispositions, standing decisions are established attitudes and beliefs which are applied to specific domains (Marcus et al., 1995; Marcus et al., 2005). Marcus and colleagues argue that decisions are not made anew every time an individual encounter a decision in the political tolerance realm. We have beliefs and attitudes which we are committed to and we do not recreate these decisions each time, echoing the idea discussed earlier that beliefs do not occur in a vacuum and are shaped by our experience and knowledge and thus influence decision making (Kuhn, 1991, 2002). Based on the research conducted about the kind of justifications used to support tolerance and intolerance, a key set of beliefs that are implicated in tolerance and acceptance have emerged which are more sophisticated than those the young children used. They are fairness (Justice, equity), empathy and reason/logic (Neale, 2002; Roga, 2006; Thomas & Witenberg, 2004; Witenberg, 2000, 2002a, 2002b, 2007; Witenberg & McDowall, 2001; Witenberg & Thomas, 2006).

The consistent use of these kind of justifications to support tolerance off between set and underlying and acceptance to human diversity appear to support the proposition that a set underlying key beliefs support a tolerant stance. Unlike the findings about the influence of context effect on decision-making or judgements, the findings about the kinds of justifications used for a tolerant stance were not context dependent. At least on a general level, the similarity in the use of the three key positive beliefs of fairness, empathy and reason across the dilemma-like stories suggest that participants were tapping the same fundamental social and sociomoral beliefs relevant to tolerance of human diversity. A similar argument can be made about beliefs of freedom of speech and very occasional prejudice which were used to reject a tolerant stance.

6.2 Fairness Elaborated

Like the younger students, the older participants also appealed to fairness. However, the justifications older students used tended to be more sophisticated in nature. The underlying belief about fairness was more elaborate and included justice and equality which accords with the broader definition of fairness and morality (Rawls, 1971, 2001). In the Witenberg and McDowall (2001) study up to 57% of all the students aged 11 to 12 and 15 to 16-years used fairness, justice and equality to justify tolerance. This is how a 15-year-old female expressed her beliefs about equality: “I would explain that we are all equal and it shouldn’t matter where you come from or what you are. We should all be treated fairly and equally”. The following examples serve to illustrate further the strongly held beliefs that people should be treated fairly, justly and equitably irrespective of background.

I think everybody should get a fair chance in life regardless who they are. (Male, 14–15 years) Anybody young or old, native or migrant, English-speaking or non-English speaking has a right to apply for a job. If they are being discriminated against then it is very unfair. (Female, 14–15 years) They are human just like everyone else. They deserve the same human rights and privileges as everyone else. So why treat them differently and unfairly? (Female, 17–18) The only difference between them [People from Aboriginal background] and us is skin colour. I would tell you that your choice is wrong because it doesn’t matter whether they are black or white. They have the same rights as everyone else. (Male, 17–18) Because we are all equal now (whether white or Indigenous). with equal rights for all. They should be given equal opportunities not more not less. (Female 22–23)

What these students all have in common, irrespective of age, the story itself or behavioural dimensions, is the belief in a fair, just and impartial world. While differences in the level of elaborations emerged in how appeal to fairness was expressed among the different age groups, the underlying message was unmistakable - we should treat others who are different from us fairly and equitably. These justifications were both about treating others fairly and against unfairness.

The association between the three belief categories was tested in the Witenberg (2007) study utilising a one-sample chi-square goodness-of-fit test that showed that the observed and expected distributions differed significantly from one another. There were significant differences in the use of the three belief categories with fairness used more often than expected by chance followed by the use of fairness/empathy with reason and logic used less often. Responses that did not support tolerance such as appeal freedom of speech and occasionally prejudicial responses were used substantially less often than expected by chance alone. The study which also examined developmental trends across three age groups found that 84.2% of all the six to seven-year olds appealled to fairness, with none of them appealing to reason or logic. In contrast, only 29% of the 11 to 12-year olds and 13.9% of the oldest participants aged between 15 and 16 years appealed to this mode of thinking. Appealing to the principle of fairness was found to be used across the age groups, but it was also clear that six to seven-year olds used appeal to fairness more often than the other two age groups, indicating a possible developmental trend specific to this area, as discussed in Chap. 4. Confirming this trend, appeal to fairness was also lowest in the oldest age groups aged 17 to 18-years in the Thomas and Witenberg (2004) study.

As argued earlier, justice, equality and fairness are also critical for moral development (e.g. Haidt, 2013; Hoffman, 2014; Kohlberg, 1984; Piaget, 1932/1965). It is therefore not surprising that there are studies that show that moral reasoning was associated with political tolerance (Avery, 1988) and that moral beliefs influence political tolerance and intolerance (Wagner, 1986). Further, a study in Ireland using a questionnaire to examined the relationship between Kohlberg’s moral reasoning levels and tolerance to outgroups in senior high school students found significant differences between principled moral reasoners and those who were at the conventional stage of moral development. Principled moral reasoners were found to be more tolerant towards outgroups than those who reasoned predominantly at the conventional level (Breslin, 1982). The corollary to this is moral disengagement, where an individual view him-or herself above normative ethical standards. Studies that have explored how moral disengagement influences harmful behaviour such as bullying and aggressive behaviour in young people have established that moral disengagement was found to be a significant predictor of such behaviour. This is because morally disengaged students were able to disengage from their moral self-sanctions in various ways (Bussey, Fitzpatrick, & Raman, 2015; Pornari & Wood, 2010; Robson & Witenberg, 2013).

When we act with fairness towards others different from us (whether it be their beliefs, lifestyle, skin colour, religion, sexual orientation or disability) we act with justice, equality and impartiality. Appeal to fairness as suggested in Chap. 4 is very likely related to prosocial and moral development. Further, on the basis of their studies, Schmitt, Gollwitzer, Maes, & Arbach (2005) concluded that justice sensitivity involving both cognition and behaviour is closely linked to moral motivation. It inspires individuals with high justice awareness to avoid injustice towards others and to aim to restore injustice. Older students’ responses about fairness/unfairness, unlike those of the six to seven-year olds, involved fair-mindedness, equality and equal rights which underpins justice sensitivity and links it to moral motivations.

While fairness emerged as very consistent belief to support tolerance, how we feel about the plight of others is also implicated in how tolerance is justified by the older students.

6.3 Empathetic Orientation and Fairness

In addition to fairness, “empathic orientation and perspective taking” were other ways to defend a tolerant stance. In fact, appealing to both empathy and fairness was a common way to support a tolerant stance. The underlying message about empathy was related to considering how it would feel to be treated badly. Tolerance in this case was justified in terms of both the broader characteristics of fairness described above and self-reflective, empathic perspective taking where the students were able to metaphorically speaking “step into another person’s shoes” (Butrus & Witenberg, 2015; Selman & Byrne, 1974; Witenberg, 2007). The following responses reflect perspective taking: “I would ask you, how would you feel if you were an Asian person and would always be served last” (12 years old) or “How you would feel if you were Asian and a shopkeeper wouldn’t serve you? Do to others as you would like them to do to you” (15 years old), echoing the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule was appealed to on a regular basis by the older students. The notion that we should treat others as we would have them treat us is often known as the “Golden Rule”. The Golden Rule is regarded as an archetypal example of universal and humanistic altruism and is viewed as endorsing reciprocal tolerance and respect (Wattles, 1996; Duxbury, 2009). It can also be argued that using the Golden Rule endorses the idea of underlying beliefs and their importance in making decisions and justifying them.

Empathy generally was appealed to on a regular basis with noticeable gender related differences. For example, Witenberg and McDowall (2001) found that 24% the students used empathy to support tolerance, however, the empathetic orientation tended to be favoured by females. Similarly, in the Witenberg (2004) study up to 10% of the participants appealed to empathy to support their tolerant judgements but again this form of justification was favoured by females. Further, an association between empathy and being a female was found in the Witenberg (2007) study where 33% of the females used empathy and only 5% of the males used this justification. Statistically this finding again shows that females appealed to empathy more often than was expected by chance alone.

Empathy is an umbrella term for compassion, sympathy, perspective-taking and understanding the plights of others and is the basis for prosocial behaviour (Hoffman, 1997, 2000, 2014). It is a complex and multidimensional process, and from a psychological perspective ranging from emotional contagion through to perspective taking. More specifically, many of the participants in the studies who expressed empathy to support a tolerant stance considered how it would feel to be treated badly by others. Perspective taking is an individual’s ability to see events from another’s perspective. It is the ability to cognitively understand another individual’s thoughts, feelings and motivations from that person’s point of view. It is also known as role-taking in the psychological literature. Thus, when empathetic approaches were used tolerance was justified in terms of both equality and self-reflective empathic perspective taking where participants were able to “step into another person’s shoes” (Selman & Byrne, 1974) and feel sympathy for the plight of others, often echoing the Golden Rule. The following examples serve to illustrate how empathy was used to support tolerance:

I would ask you what you would do if you stood in the Asian’s shoes when they were treated like this. How would you feel? (Male, 14–15 years) I would tell them to reconsider the actions and put themselves in the Asian person’s shoes’ (Male, 17–18 years) How would you like someone doing this to you? Treat others as you would like to be treated! (Female, 14–15 years) I feel very upset when I see someone is being treated badly because they are different. (Male, 14–15 years) Your choice is wrong because if all the Aboriginals are living on one street and they didn’t let you live there, how would you feel? (Male, 11–12 years) If you went to another country and was treated differently like the aboriginals, how would you feel? Would you think it is right that you are treated inferior to others. Prejudice is wrong and hurtful. Female (18–19)

Together with empathic orientation, perspective taking is a mean by which we can respond to other people’s needs more readily and interact with others more successfully. Hoffman (1997, 2000, 2014) argues that empathy is a motivator of prosocial and altruistic behaviour. It is also a basis by which prejudice can be reduced (Batson, 2008; Batson, Chang, Orr, & Rowland, 2002). Although, empathy and perspective taking are both implicated in moral development they are particularly relevant to the moral care orientation (Gilligan, 1983; Gilligan, & Attanucci, 1988; Haidt, 2013; Hoffman, 2000, 2014; Skoe, Eisenberg, & Cumberland, 2002). Interestingly, philosophers such as Hume (1738/1968), argued that emotions are the basis of moral judgement, action and behaviour Hume 1738/1968. In contrast studies about bullying show that low levels of empathy influences improper behaviour. For example, a study by Jolliffe and Farrington (2006) found that low affect or emotional contagion was significantly related to bullying behaviour. Research also shows a mediation effect of moral disengagement with low level of empathy on bullying involvement (Kokkinos & Kipritsi, 2018).

Empathic concern for others was also found to be a powerful predictor of tolerance in a study which examined personality characteristic of agreeableness, openness and empathy in relation to tolerance (Butrus & Witenberg, 2015). Although all three variables were found to be significantly related to tolerance, specifically, the results showed that empathic concern is a significant factor for tolerance to human diversity. What we found was that individuals with higher levels of empathic concern were more likely to be tolerant to those who were different. This is because empathic individuals are sensitive to the thoughts, feelings and experiences of others (Davis, 1983a, 1983b). Logically, if we feel concern for the welfare of others and identify with their plight, we would be less likely to form prejudicial beliefs or opinions or engage in acts of discrimination towards them.

Other studies also confirm the importance of empathy in regard to tolerance. A study which examined first-year university students’ openness to diversity found that empathy is a strong predictor of openness to diversity or tolerance. Moral reasoning was also found to be a significant predictor of openness to diversity supporting my contention of the relevancy of moral reason to a tolerant stance (Gerson & Neilson, 2014). More recent studies using multicultural personality measures assessed the relationship between multicultural personality dimensions and tolerance to diversity. It was found that cultural empathy, the ability to appreciate and consider positively cultural similarities and differences, was correlated with tolerance to others who are culturally different (Korol, 2017; Korol, Gonçalves, & Cabral, 2016). Although, empathetic concerns and cultural empathy are not interchangeable definitionally, the findings nonetheless point to the relevancy of the broader function of empathy in relation to tolerance.

6.4 Gender Differences in the Use of Empathy

As the research presented earlier showed, both females and males used beliefs about empathy to justify a tolerant stance. In the studies reviewed, the findings did indeed show that there was a significant trend for females to support tolerance in this way. One of the enduring debates in the last two or three decades has been whether morality is gender specific (Gilligan, 1983; Skoe, Eisenberg, & Cumberland, 2002; Wark & Krebs, 2000). Gilligan (1983) argued that women’s morality was influenced by care and empathy and this is now regarded as the explanations as to why women tended to score lower on Kohlberg’s (1981, 1984) stages of moral development. In contrast, Wark, Eisenberg, & Cumberland (2002) found that when resolving moral dilemmas females scored higher than males on levels of empathy. However, it is too early to predict gender differences about tolerance of diversity, especially since there is a substantial body of research that disputes the claims of gender differences in moral reasoning (e.g., Walker, 1984, 2006) which cannot be ignored. According to Walker (2006), reanalysis of the data reveals inconsequential differences which are possibly related to dilemma content rather than to gender differences.

Research by Baron-Cohen and colleagues (Baron-Cohen, 2014; Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004) about empathy could shed some insight into why females appeal to empathy more often than males. Baron-Cohen found that the occurrence of empathy in humans could be plotted on a classical bell shape curve, which he calls the “Empathy Bell Curve”. Most of his participants scored within the normal distribution, with only some scoring at the extreme ends. That is, with either very little empathy or very high empathy. Baron-Cohen found that while females only scored a little higher than males on “The Empathy Quotient” which measures ability to feel what others feel and react to it, the difference is statistically significant. He also suggests that there is an empathy circuit in the brain which encompasses many areas, including the dorsal and ventral medial prefrontal cortex, the middle cingulate cortex, anterior insular cortex, the amygdala and many other parts of the brain. How successfully the empathy circuit functions in turn regulates the level of empathy a person may feel. Open to debate is the question whether females’ empathy circuit functions better than males. However, there are other factors that influence empathy. Social factors and biology also influence levels of empathy. For example, prenatal levels of testosterone can affect an individual’s ability to feel empathy, while mistreatment in childhood can also lead to maladaptation and low levels of empathy, among other developmental lags (Baron-Cohen, 2011).

It is therefore possible that patterns of socialisation in which girls are encouraged more to express emotions may have contributed to females’ empathic responses, while boys are encouraged to express themselves using reasoning and logic and more often than not discouraged from being emotional. The ‘masculinity of reason’ has been acknowledged in previous psychological research (e.g., Applebaum, 2001). However, Jaffe and Hyde (2000) argue on the basis of their meta-analysis of moral orientation that while there are statistically significant differences, they do not support strongly the claim that the care orientation based on empathy is used largely by females/women and that the justice orientation based on reason is used largely by males/men. The effect size is small, thus supporting Walker’s (2006) argument. In the studies about tolerance both females and males use empathy and reason but females tend to favour empathy. No doubt research in the future will help us to understand the gender related differences in judging and justifying tolerance and how it develops.

What is often further linked to empathy is Theory of Mind (ToM) or mentalizing. ToM involves the ability to comprehend that others have mental states, such as beliefs, motives, intentions and feelings and includes the ability to attribute these states to another person or persons (Baron-Cohen, 2011). Mentalizing ability is said to be located in the prefrontal cortex and it is believed to be a later phylogenetic development in the human species. Mentalizing is the basis for perspective taking which is an intellectual act of understanding how others think and feel in contrast to “an emotional reaction elicited by and congruent with another’s state” (Eisenberg et al., 1995, p. 518). This ability emerges only from the age of six and may explain why the six to seven-year old students favoured fairness which emerges earlier in development. In contrast, fairness becomes salient at about the age of four and is generalised to social issues (Fiske, 1991).

Both findings from psychological and more recent neuroscience research (e.g., Moll & de Oliveira-Souza, 2007). show that humans can take the perspective of others either through empathy by feeling their sorrow or joy and/or through the process of mentalizing by understanding their feeling, motives, beliefs and desires. Undoubtable, both feeling and understanding are important qualities that brings together cognitive and emotional empathy in human interaction. While they are also intertwined, neuroscience research shows that empathising and mentalizing occur in different region of the brain (Gu et al., 2012; Singer, 2006). From an evolutionary perspective, empathising occurs in the older part of the brain, specifically in the anterior insular cortex where moral judgments about fairness are also situated (e.g. Singer, 2006). Psychological research demonstrates that prosocial behaviour emerges early in ontological or individual development and that it is based on intuitive processes rather than effortful cognitive functions. We know that intellectually infants are not capable of moral reasoning, as Piaget suggested, nonetheless by 18 months they spontaneously help other children in need. There is progressive development of prosocial tendencies with age with the possibility that these prosocial tendencies are also the origin of morality (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom 2007) (and by default possibly tolerance). In contrast, mentalizing which occurs in the prefrontal cortex is a later progression in phylogenetic development of mankind. Developmentally we are able to empathise before we mentalize. This is a very interesting neurological finding and suggests that contagion empathy emerges before the need to intellectually understand the feelings of others.

Neither Piaget or Kohlberg have taken into consideration the importance of empathy as a possible basis for the development of human morality. More recent theories both in psychology and philosophy recognise the importance of the role of empathy in the moral domain, which is not related to the moral care orientation (e.g., Haidt, 2013; Hoffman, 2014). Thus, the argument that tolerance is best placed within the moral domain is strengthened by these findings.

Neuroscience research confirms contagion empathy where we can feel another person’s distress. Research has shown how mirror neurons on a very simple level act as a unifying mechanism in the brain and allow people to connect with others (Jacoboni, 2009). “We are social animals” (Gallese, 2001, p. 33), after all, and the brain is designed to deal with social interaction between people. More recently, Gazzola, Aziz-Zadeh and Keysers (2006) established a relationship between people who experience more activation in their mirror neurons system with those who score high on an empathy scale, thereby supporting the idea of a relationship between mirror neurons and empathy. Through mirror neurons we can experience the same sadness we can feel for ourselves when we see others are sad. In other words, mirror mechanisms allow us to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. It is not surprising in the light of these findings that Jolliffe and Farrington (2006) found that low affect was related to bullying. Empathy alone may not make us act with tolerance and fairness towards others different from us or who are being discriminated against, yet it is most likely the motivational power underpinning treating others well who are different from us.

Although this research is in its infancy and debatable, this is another way of explaining how we feel empathy for others, as these mirror neurons help us feel as others feel. However, there is little research in the area of neuroscience at this stage which can confirm conscious processes of perspective taking. Psychological research on the other hand does support the importance of empathy and self-other orientation of perspective taking (e.g., Hoffman, 2000, 2014).

Perspective taking and empathic orientation are means by which we can interact with others more successfully and respond to another person’s needs more readily. We know from previous research that empathy is a motivator of prosocial and altruistic behaviour (Hoffman, 2000, 2014) and tolerance is undoubtedly prosocial in nature. We also know that empathy and perspective-taking are both implicated in moral development (Haidt, 2013; Hoffman, 2000, 2014). In the final analysis, the research about tolerance to human diversity shows the significance of empathy not only for females but also for males. In other words, empathy enables tolerance.

6.5 Reason and Logic

A final positive set of beliefs favoured by older students concerned reason, logic and even reflective thinking. There was also a tendency for males to appeal to reason more often than females. When pleas to reason were used, whether by females or males, they appealed to rationality, logic and indicated the stupidity of holding prejudicial beliefs, let alone acting on them. Participants also questioned assumptions and generalisations and asked for evidence for what they regarded as irrational beliefs and ideas. Students who used reason and logic believed that intolerance was due to holding stupid, silly, unreasonable or unreflected ideas. For example, one 12-year-old male student observed that giving children from Indigenous backgrounds lower marks was stupid and “how could you possibly think that way?” A 15-year-old suggested that serving Asians last was “being very unreasonable. They [Asians] can’t actually help that they are Asians”. Another 15-year-old sums up this idea very convincingly and concisely: “I would tell you that your views are ignorant and ill informed”.

This form of justification was used by 19% of the students in the Witenberg and McDowall (2001) study. In the Thomas and Witenberg (2004) study, 20% of the youngest age group (11 to 12-year-olds) used this justification while 30% of the two oldest age groups (15 to 16 and 17 to 18 years old), appealed to reason and logic. Further, in the Witenberg (2007) study males appealed to beliefs about reason and logic more often than was expected by chance alone. The following examples further serve to illustrate how reason and logic were used to support tolerance:

I personally think that it’s stupid that a person can think like that. (Male, 11–12 years) …because racism is bad and it’s stupid and illogical. (Female, 14–15 years) This person is misinformed. I think that this is a really irrational attitude. (Male, 14–15 years)

Some, usually older students expressed their beliefs in the irrationality of intolerance by challenging generalisations and assumptions about the events and people in the stories, thus questioning the very basis from which prejudice is formed:

Because it is stereotypical of a small minority of Aboriginals… It is really only true for a small minority. I would ask if you know any Aboriginals, or what you base your argument on. (Female, 17–18 years)

It may seem harder to link being rational to moral beliefs, such as treating others fairly and empathetically. Nonetheless, the responses suggest a sense of indignation or questioning of stereotypical beliefs and discriminatory acts with the implication that such behaviours are morally wrong. It can also suggest a form of moral maturity where questioning of unjust ideas and laws is an indication of moral disapproval and even outrage. Dewey (1933) argues that reflective thinking is about careful deliberation of specific beliefs. What drives the thinking is the underlying moral value that “racism is bad and it’s stupid and illogical” as one of the students express it in the example above. Both Piaget (1932/1965) and Kohlberg (1981, 1984) argued that logical thinking emerges with cognitive maturity and underlies moral judgments and justifications. Being logical and reflective can promote tolerance to human diversity as it enables a person to see the stupidity of holding baseless prejudicial beliefs and engaging in acts of discrimination. The six to seven-year olds, not surprisingly, rarely use reason and logic since questioning assumptions and generalisations and seeking evidence is only developmentally available to more cognitively mature individuals (Kuhn, 1988, 1991, 2002).

Vogt (1997) argues that dogmatism and inflexibility are ways of not thinking which diminishes our ability to be tolerant. In contrast, the ability to think and reflect critically on our beliefs and conduct may be the key to understanding tolerance alongside empathetic responses and beliefs in fairness and justice. Reflective thinking may also be important in setting appropriate moral limits to tolerance. Without reflective thinking and deliberation, the risk of an unquestioning acceptance of practices that should not be sanctioned or tolerated is more probable. Possibly, the students who used freedom of speech as a justification for expressing intolerant beliefs have not yet understood the moral limits of freedom of speech.

In the psychological research referred to earlier (Butrus & Witenberg, 2015), the personality dimensions which predict tolerance emerged as open-mindedness and agreeableness. Openness to experience as a personality dimension has a heritability component which is known as dispositional tendency (see also Marcus et al., 1995). However, the beliefs and schemas or mental representations that allow the trait to be expressed are learnt and known as characteristic adaptations. Therefore, open-mindedness, flexible thinking and tolerance can be taught. Further support for the finding comes from the studies reported earlies using multicultural personality measures (Korol, 2017; Korol et al., 2016) which found that open-mindedness to diversity was a positive predictor of tolerance. This is in contrast, to Nesdale and colleagues’ (2012) work which found that open-mindedness was a negative predictor of prejudice. This is not surprising as being close minded to new experiences, such as individuals from different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds and holding intolerant beliefs or even endorsing them, is incongruent with open mindedness (Butrus & Witenberg, 2015).

Similarly, agreeableness can be taught which in turn increases empathy. Agreeable people tend to be selfless, helpful, compassionate, sympathetic, cooperative and forgiving with very strong prosocial tendencies. The Butrus & Witenberg study (2015) concluded that agreeable people tend to be non-prejudiced and non-discriminatory in their actions.

It is difficult to determine from this research why males from 11 years of age have a tendency to appeal to reason more often than females. Once again, it is possible that patterns of socialisation which tends to be different for boys and girls may be implicated. This in turns builds on the tendency for females to be more empathetic whether through socialisation or nature. In contrast, boys are encouraged to express themselves using reasoning and logic and are discouraged from being emotional. In the research about tolerance, both females and males used both empathy and reason but the data does indicate that there are gender related differences between the approaches. No doubt research in the future will help us to understand better these gender related differences. What is important is that reason and logic are used by both females and males to support tolerance.

6.6 Freedom of Speech and Tolerance: The Right to Express Any Opinions Without Restriction or Limits

Although rare, there were very occasional prejudicial comments such as “Asians don’t belong in Australia” or “Aboriginals are lazy”. However interestingly, the major constraint to tolerance to human diversity was not necessarily prejudice towards others but beliefs in freedom of speech as a democratic right (Witenberg, 2004, 2007). This was usually in response to the questions relating to speaking about prejudicial beliefs and at times about holding such beliefs. There were clear indications that appeal to freedom of speech as justification for at times holding prejudicial beliefs and much more often speaking about them increased with age. In fact, a number of studies in Australia (Neale, 2002; Thomas & Witenberg, 2004; Witenberg, 2002a, 2002b, 2007) and one in Israel (Witenberg, Cinamon, & Iram, 2003) have shed some unanticipated light on the relationship between tolerance and freedom of speech. Content analysis of students’ justifications, as described earlier, showed that tolerance was supported on the basis of three main beliefs of fairness, empathy and reason towards the three target groups. Surprisingly, the major constraint to tolerance was not prejudice towards these groups but students’ beliefs in freedom of speech as a democratic right, highlighting the paradoxical nature of freedom of speech. This was a totally unanticipated finding and contradictory in its intent from endorsing traditional prejudicial beliefs. While, none of the six to seven-year olds appealled to freedom of speech (Hogan, 2002; Witenberg, 2007), many of the older students assumed that it was acceptable to openly express prejudicial beliefs “because we had free speech in this county” or “we have the right to have our own opinions and also talk about them too”, subordination tolerance to freedom of speech. In a previous study Witenberg (2004) found that the subordination of tolerance to freedom of speech was most evident in the 18 to 22-year olds and least used by the 11 to 12-year olds. Interestingly, Helwig (1998) also found that older adolescents and young adults in Canada subordinated equality of opportunity to freedom of speech. The right to hold both prejudiced beliefs and to speak about them was unanticipated in the 11 to 12-year-old students who occasionally also appealed to freedom of speech as the following example illustrates. “Everybody has the right to have their own opinion and talk about them” (Male, 11–12 years).

Others usually older students appealed to the belief that within a free democratic country freedom of speech was a right, as the following example illustrates.

If this person wants to tell such things he can do so because this is a free society and we have no right to persuade him otherwise – he has the right to say what he wants.’ (Male, 18–19 years)

At other times, some students endorsed the right of others to express themselves openly and freely, even if they were in disagreement with such beliefs themselves. The following example illustrates such a stance.

Even though I don’t agree with this person [stopping young Asian people from joining a sports club] I believe she/he has the right to state her/his opinion and can share her/his opinion with others. We live in a free society and we have the right to say what we believe.’ (Female, 17–18 years)

The responses show that with age the participating students appear to develop more sophisticated arguments based on increased knowledge about democratic rights and freedom of speech as the above examples illustrate.

The data also showed age-related differences in the use of freedom of speech and beliefs. For example, in one of the stories used in the Witenberg (2002b) study about a shopkeeper who tells others that people from Asian backgrounds should be served last because they do not belong in Australia, only 5.6% of the 11 to 12-year-olds justified this behaviour by appeal to freedom of speech. In contrast, 25.5% of the 15 to 16-year-olds and up to 47.4% of the 18 to 22 year-olds used such justifications. There were similar findings for other stories and other studies where freedom of speech was used to justify speaking about and at times holding prejudicial beliefs. Importantly, freedom of speech though was never used as a justification for acting on such beliefs. For example, in the Israeli study, students accepted both holding and speaking about prejudicial beliefs more often than acting on them. Again, the Israeli students usually justified these judgements on the basis of freedom of opinion and speech but did not use this justification for acting discriminately. These findings are in contrast to results about 6 to 7-year-olds globally affirming tolerance on the basis of fairness with no appeal to freedom of speech (Chung-Voon, 2002; Hogan, 2002). Freedom of speech appears to legitimise, at times, holding of prejudicial beliefs and often talking about them.

These beliefs may reflect political debate about freedom of speech and democratic rights in democracies such as Australia and Israel. Civic education may have also influenced such beliefs. However, it is possible that the older students who advocated freedom of speech also lack the understanding that with freedom of speech comes responsibilities not to encourage prejudice and discrimination. Ostensibly, they also seem to lack understanding of the harm principle which Mill (1859/1974) and other philosophers argue in favour of when dealing with the conflict between freedom of speech and tolerance. Mill endorsed, supported and affirmed the right of the individual to express opinions and to discuss and even act on them as long as they did not cause harm to others. A recent survey about free speech in the USA with young people from 18 years of age representing a broad section of American society found that while 79% of the sample agreed that hateful speech was morally unacceptable, nonetheless 59% of the sample endorsed freedom of speech without interference. This finding again highlights the paradoxical nature of freedom of speech and its complex relationship with tolerance.

However, conflict in values may account for the subordination of tolerance to freedom of speech rather than necessarily a decline in high levels of tolerance to human diversity (Witenberg, 2004). Arguably, tolerance and freedom of speech are ordered by their relative importance to the individual (Schwartz, 1992). It is also possible that in defence of freedom of speech as a fundament right in democratic societies many of the participants who defended freedom of speech and expression did not considered the consequences. The consequences of unrestricted expression of prejudice towards others who are more vulnerable and more often the target of prejudice and discrimination. Generally, the coordination of basic human rights and their relationship with each other needs further consideration both empirically and practically.

6.7 Conclusion

The studies reviewed in this chapter provide some evidence about the reasoning processes of younger and older adolescents and young adults about tolerance to human diversity by appealing to fairness/justice, empathy and reason/logic. The findings provide us with some insight into how tolerance is conceptualised, beyond the youngest children aged six to seven. However, age and gender also influenced justifications favoured to support a tolerant stance. There was a tendency for the youngest participants to appeal to fairness more often than the older ones. There was also a tendency for females to appeal to empathy or fairness/empathy more often than by chance, while older males particularly favoured reason and logic. These findings support the contention that tolerance is not simply the opposite of prejudice but a more multifaceted cognitive concept in its own right, more closely related to prosocial and moral cognition and behaviour. The contention that tolerance is better placed within the moral domain rather than the opposite of prejudice is at least tentatively supported by these findings and the supporting arguments.

The findings have implication for education including beliefs in freedom of speech. From 11 years of age there was a progressive tendency to acknowledge the conflicting principles of tolerance and freedom of speech and to subordinate tolerance to freedom of speech. This was particularly evident when there was a conflict between open expression of prejudice and tolerance. However, the subordination of tolerance to freedom of speech does not necessarily imply a decline in high levels of tolerance but could rather point to a conflict in values. That is, tolerance and freedom of speech are ordered by their relative importance to the individual and may reflect education outcomes that do not emphasise the limits of freedom of speech (Schwartz, 1992, Witenberg, 2004).

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Rivka T. WitenbergThe Psychology of ToleranceSpringerBriefs in Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3789-5_7

7. Some Implications for Education

Rivka T. Witenberg[1]

(1)

Independent Researcher, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Rivka T. Witenberg

Email: riwitenberg@outlook.com

7.1 Education for Tolerance and Acceptance Based on Fairness, Empathy and Reason

The psychological research about tolerance to human diversity provides some initial empirical evidence about what underlies and motivates tolerance. These findings have without doubt some possible implications for teaching tolerance. Essentially programs about the promotion of tolerance to human diversity and acceptance of others have a tendency to concentrate on how to eliminate prejudice and discrimination with the idea that tolerance will emerge. Jane Elliott “blue eyes-brown eyes” method to eliminate prejudice is a well-recognised exercise used with students as young as 8 years of age. This is but one example of the numerous programs that operate on the same principle of curbing prejudice and discrimination with the assumption that they induce tolerance and acceptance (e.g., Oskamp, 2000). A search on the internet will confirm the numerous programs using this method where the emphasis is on eliminating prejudice. While undoubtedly, they are useful educational tools, one of the criticisms of such programs is that they draw unnecessary attention to difference, particularly with young children and that they are problematic in classrooms with diverse student populations of colour, creed and culture. However, there is an alternative way to approach the education and promotion of tolerance and acceptance. Research presented earlier in this book shows that beliefs in fairness (justice, equality and equity) empathy (sympathy, compassion and care) and reason (logic and open-mindedness) underpin tolerance. My contention is that programs teaching and encouraging justice, fairness and empathy do not always need to teach directly about either prejudice or tolerance. This is particularly important with young children and younger adolescents, since tolerance and acceptance can be taught and promoted indirectly by fostering a strong sense of justice, fairness, empathy and reason, bypassing altogether the highlighting of prejudice and discrimination. The understanding and consideration of acceptance and tolerance should emerge not through a process of didactic or instructional teaching but through the participatory involvement by students and their teachers or instructors. The role is to encourage moral and socially moral individuals who develop a robust sense of fairness, justice and empathy which will also influence tolerance and acceptance. Moral values, such as justice and empathy, are shared, if not universal values, relevant to dealing with human diversity (Blum, 1999).

The psychological research reviewed in this book about tolerance to human diversity provides some alternative empirical evidence about what underlies and motivates tolerance with some implications from these findings for teaching tolerance. Curricula which are aimed at promoting tolerance should focus more on the relationship between tolerance and morality of fairness (justice, impartiality, equality), empathy (sympathy, compassion, perspective-taking and understanding) and reason (logic, thoughtfulness, understanding), and less on suppressing prejudice and discrimination as is so common in promoting tolerance to human diversity. Consequently, educators and curriculum designers across the education system need to have a solid foundation in the theoretical framework of tolerance and acceptance of others who are different taking into account the complex definitions of tolerance and its paradoxical nature. They also need to understand the possible conflict between what tolerance entails and other rights, such as freedom of speech. In order to teach about tolerance, teachers and educators also need to understand the paradoxical nature of tolerance and the limits which must be placed on intolerable beliefs and practices, even if they are culturally acceptable. The aim of educating for tolerance is to develop understanding and acceptance of diversity in culture, colour, creed, nationality, religion, sexual orientation and disability that are different from students’ own experiences and understanding and not to aim to teach and promote value-free education. However, socio-moral limits must be highlighted about what is acceptable and what is not. For example, in many African cultures children are married young and often undergo painful initiation ceremonies. In other words, religious and cultural practices which promote violation of human rights cannot be acceptable and should not be tolerated, regardless of deep cultural beliefs and practices. Education aimed at promoting tolerance should therefore focus more on moral values and beliefs and their relationships to tolerance and acceptance rather than specific practices and beliefs. Such an approach would draw on overlapping shared moral values.

Further, age appropriate material is essential. I observed a lesson on anti-bullying as part of a tolerance program. The material was cognitively unsuitable for the age group of grades six or seven students. Particularly the boys lost interest and became distracted and bored. The material failed to engage them because it was more suitable for older adolescents at high school aged 15 years and upwards. Harnessing young children’s strong sense of fairness to reject intolerance should not be underestimated when designing a curriculum for primary/elementary students as long as the curriculum takes into account the cognitive capacities of children before 12 or 13 years of age. Traditionally, appeal to empathy is used in intervention programs to promote intergroup relations but such an approach may be more suitable for younger and older adolescents rather than young children. This conclusion is based on the findings about the development of empathy which was presented earlier. Fairness becomes prominent at about the age of four. Once it emerges there is a tendency for it to become generalised to diverse social issues as the child matures and is able to utilise fairness as a theory about a fair world, irrespective whether it is innate or acquired (Fiske, 1991). In adolescence and with increased maturity, young people develop higher order thinking processes which are also aided by an increased level of knowledge. Cognitive maturity and increased knowledge enable the emergence of alternative beliefs which supports tolerance and acceptance. Consequently, reason, logic and questioning illogical ideas and generalisations to challenge prejudicial beliefs and discriminatory acts emerge. The development of these skills should not be underestimated in educational programs to promote acceptance of others who are different with older adolescents and young adults whose processing capacities allow them to consider several aspects of a problem simultaneously. This is in contrast to the younger children who encode a situation more narrowly and tend to focus on the most salient and noticeable issue, often disregarding the complexity of the problem (Bjorklund, 1995, 2013). Younger children see an unfair situation simply as unfair and respond accordingly, while cognitive maturity and an expanded knowledge base enables the individual to move beyond the obvious and make judgements on the basis of fairness, empathy and reason.

The research showed that gender differences also emerged with females favouring fairness and empathy while older males favored reasoning and logic. Therefore, alongside the acknowledgement of age related differences, gender should also be considered, with appeal to reason and logic more suited to promote tolerance in young males alongside the use of empathy which appeal more to younger females. Younger males between 13 and 15 years of age were found to be the least tolerant. This is a finding supported by other studies (Arensmeier, 2017) and should be considered seriously in developing intervention programs suitable for this group.

When designing programs to promote tolerance, acceptance and broad-mindedness, students’ current knowledge should be the basis for extending new knowledge and information within the cognitive capacity of the specific age group. Derman-Sparks and Ramsey (2011) suggest that children should be encouraged to explore a wide array of feelings and personal relationships to learn about diversity. Previous research in political tolerance has shown that from the age of six, children do understand difficult concepts, such as tolerance and equality, justice and fairness, as long as it is suitably presented for their age (Helwig, 1995, 1998).

As suggested earlier, one of the issues that is often overlooked in educating for tolerance is the paradoxical nature of tolerance. There is often a confusion about the nature of tolerance and what is intolerable. Being able to understand that we cannot, and should not, tolerate the intolerable does not mean that we are intolerant. This is probably best approached with students from about 12 to 13 years of age and could be based on dilemma-like stories which will challenge students to think, discuss and argue the merits and limitations of tolerance.

To reiterate, empathy is a very important aspect of morality and based on the current findings is also important for tolerance. Can empathy be taught? We know from research data that empathetic individuals tend to be sensitive to the thoughts, feelings and experiences of others (Davis, 1983a, 1983b) and empathy appears to have an immediate relationship to tolerance as the Butrus and Witenberg (2015) study found. Empathy also has a strong relationship with moral values (Hoffman, 2000, 2014). Empathy has a neurological basis which is located not only in the cortex but also distributed across other parts of the brain, such as the hypothalamus and the endocrine system, and its developmental trajectory is in advance of cognitive development. The extensive neurological basis for empathy is perhaps well characterised in Baron-Cohen’s (2011) empathy circuit which was discussed in chapter six. Psychological studies do suggest that empathy can be taught and encouraged to develop within individual capacity. There are various approaches for different age groups which help to develop empathy for the plight of others though role playing, interactive role playing, discussions based on dilemmas and mentalising (see for example Upright, 2002 and Goldstein & Winner, 2012 and also Chap. 6 on mentalising) which leads to the understanding that other people may hold beliefs, emotions and feelings different from us. Studies show that dispositional empathy, the ability to imagine and experience the feelings of others or stepping into someone else’s shoes increased with the use of acting classes in the early school years. These are important socio-cognitive skills which are essential for moral development and tolerance. What these studies importantly show is that empathy and the ability to recognise our own and other’s feelings can be taught.

These teaching methods can be adopted for different groups as long as the material and the ideas are age appropriate. By being encouraged to step into someone else’s shoes and feeling what they feel, and through the process of mentalizing as well as intellectually understanding others’ feelings, students of all ages, including young adults, can develop a deeper empathy and sympathy. These experiences also encourage perspective taking which involves both feeling empathic concern for and understanding how others feel intellectually. Perspective taking motivates us to act altruistically and in a moral way (Hoffman, 2014). The Butrus and Witenberg study (2015) found that feeling concern for others could be an important factor in rejecting intolerance. Specifically feeling concerns for others decreases the likelihood of expressing openly prejudicial beliefs and acting on them. Empathy appears to have a proximal or immediate effect on tolerance.

The use of reasoning and logic which were used to justify judgments, particularly of the older students, should also be encouraged both generally and specifically. One of the cornerstones of moral development is the development of cognitive capacities (Kohlberg, 1984; Piaget, 1932/1965). In the final analysis, tolerance must be reflective in nature. If we teach young people to view tolerance as pro-social in nature, involving equality, respect and acceptance within moral bounds, it will enable them to deal with conflicting claims of beliefs, values and ideas as long as they fit within schemes of pro-social norms and moral values.

7.2 The Relationship Between Tolerance and Freedom of Speech

There are also implications from these findings about the frequent use of freedom of speech for civic curriculum development and education. The data reported earlier highlights that essential human rights such as tolerance and freedom of speech can at times be in conflict with each other. With increasing age and cognitive maturity, there was a tendency for students to subordinate tolerance to freedom of speech. More specifically, many of the older students from about 12 years of age believed very strongly that it was wrong to act on prejudicial beliefs and discriminate against others different from them. Yet, many of them expressed clearly and convincingly that they believed that it was acceptable to speak about prejudicial beliefs and less often hold such beliefs because “we have freedom of speech in this country”. Specifically, with increasing cognitive maturity and age, there was a tendency for students to subordinate tolerance to freedom of speech. There is no logical reason why young people should view one basic human right as more important than another and why they subordinate tolerance to freedom of speech.

An important next step in the development of the coordination of basic human rights in young people is the realisation that there are moral limits to freedom of speech when it is in conflict with tolerance (and possibly other rights) and to encourage reflective individuals who are able to understand the interaction between freedom of speech and tolerance and to other rights. More generally, it could be argued that education aimed at promoting basic human rights may need to focus more on developing skills and reflective thinking which enable us to understand the importance of human rights, the conflicts between them and to be able to place relative values on them. Reflective thinking moves the person from assuming that freedom of speech is irrefutable and that there are limits on freedom of speech so that it cannot be used to vilify others, to support intolerance, prejudice and attack on the integrity of others. This is another issue that education needs to deal with. For teachers and educators this is a clear challenge to rethink this relationship.

Therefore, educating for a conscious awareness about the tension between basic human rights such as tolerance and freedom of speech and its resolution is educationally and socially important in diverse societies. This form of education would be suitable in the adolescent years when cognitive maturity and the development of conceptualised knowledge (Herbert & Burt, 2003) enable abstract thinking which allow for consideration and coordination of different aspects of a problem. Upholding human rights requires the capacities to distinguish between different rights and their relative merit. If tolerance is to be more than endurance of others who are different from us and/or more than just refraining from discrimination, we need to educate for reflective individuals who are able to understand the interaction of freedom of speech with tolerance and with other rights. More generally, it could be argued that education aimed at promoting basic human rights may need to focus more on developing socio-cognitive skills, reflective thinking and moral integrity which will enable students to consider human rights, the conflicts between them and their coordination.

Studies show that basic human rights such as freedom of speech and tolerance can be understood by children as young as 6 years of age (Helwig, 1995, 1998). Therefore, human rights education can begin early, as long as the curriculum takes into account the cognitive capacities of children before 12 years of age. That is, teaching material needs to avoid complex and conflicting principles or events.

7.3 Conclusion

The aim of education for tolerance and acceptance of others who are different from us is to encourage moral individuals with a strong sense of fairness/justice, empathy and reason which influence how we embrace tolerance and acceptance. Moral values, such as justice, empathy and respect, are shared, if not universal values relevant to dealing with human diversity (Blum, 1999).

Generally, programs need to be developed that take into consideration the multifaceted nature of tolerance, the deliberative process underlying it and its relationship to the moral domain and the cognitive capacity of the students participating in the programs. Educators need to keep in mind the maturational processes of students. While it is important to eliminate all forms of prejudice and discrimination, grounding tolerance in moral and socio-moral theories allows for an alternative educational approach to promote harmonious intergroup relationships, thus avoiding the common approach of focusing on prejudice and how to eliminate it. When tolerance is viewed as a moral obligation, it can be integrated within both moral and values education, as well as throughout the curriculum, in such areas as literature, history, peace and justice programs as well as philosophy for schools. Part of this education would involve developing a strong sense of fairness and justice and the ability to empathise with the plight of others who are different in colour, creed, ethnicity, nationality, or disability (and later in development about sexual orientation). Harnessing young children’s strong sense of fairness, which was so evident in the research to support tolerance, should be considered as critical in designing curriculum for elementary/primary aged students as long as the curriculum takes into account the cognitive and maturational capacities of children before 12 or 13 years of age. With older adolescents and young adults reason and logic need to be encouraged to deal with the complexity of tolerance and acceptance.

As the development of empathy emerges later than the development of fairness, empathy should be utilised for younger and older adolescents rather than very young children who tend to focus on fairness. Developing a stronger sense of empathic disposition towards others who are different will also help to promote tolerance and acceptance alongside the development of reason, logic and open-mindedness as tools to fight prejudice and discrimination and promote tolerance and acceptance.

Bearing in mind the complex definitions of tolerance and the possible conflict between them as well as other rights such as freedom of speech, educators and curriculum designers should develop a deep understanding of the theoretical nature of tolerance as well as understand its paradoxical nature and the limits which must be placed on intolerable beliefs and practices.

Overall such an approach to promote tolerance and acceptance would draw on overlapping shared moral and socio-moral values education aims to promote.

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