To Örebro University

Although intergroup attitudes are assumed to develop due to the influence of parents, there is no longitudinal evidence supporting this claim. In addition, research on socialization of intergroup attitudes has omitted possible effects of adolescents on their parents. We also know little about the conditions under which intergroup attitudes are transmitted. This two-wave, 2 years apart, study of adolescents (N = 507) and their parents examined the relations between parents and adolescents' prejudice and tolerance from a longitudinal perspective. The study tested whether parental prejudice and tolerance would predict over-time changes in adolescents' attitudes and whether adolescents' prejudice and tolerance would elicit changes in parental attitudes. Additionally, it explored whether some of the effects would depend on perceived parental support. Results showed significant bidirectional influences between parents and adolescents' attitudes. In addition, adolescents who perceived their parents as supportive showed higher parent-adolescent correspondence in prejudice than youth with low parental support. These findings show that intergroup attitudes develop as a result of mutual influences between parents and adolescents. Hence, the unidirectional transmission model and previous research findings should be revisited. The results also suggest that parents' prejudice influence adolescents' attitudes to the extent that youth perceive their parents as supportive.

In this chapter we explore how the Culture of Peace can be and in some cases is being actualized. First, noting that the United Nations resolutions on a Culture of Peace call for shifts in values, attitudes, and behaviors, we give attention to values that are supportive of peaceful attitudes and behavior. Second, we consider the nature and flexibility of social identity and how it relates to promoting a Culture of Peace. We suggest that humans are fully capable of forming multiple social identities, and drawing upon this ability, the promotion of a global identity in addition to lower levels of social identity can facilitate the development of a Culture of Peace. Third, and not totally separate from a consideration of values and identity, we focus on the role of interdependence and cooperation in promoting a Culture of Peace. A key point is that the promotion of a Culture of Peace does not exist merely in social science theory or in utopian dreams: The creation of a Culture of Peace is already an ongoing real-world process, and we consider several examples, such as the Mediterranean Action Plan (MAP) and the European Union (EU) as a regional peace system, to highlight this point.

There is an oft-voiced proposition within evolutionary psychology that over the course of evolutionary time, natural selection favored human males who have killed over those men who have not. The implication is that killing has been favorably selected as a fitness enhancing strategy. Interestingly, the impe-tus for this proposition in large part stems from one particular article on the tribal Yanomamö people of Brazil and Venezuela published in 1988. In this arti-cle, Chagnon (1988) reports that Yanomamö men who have participated in a killing out-reproduced their same-aged peers. If a Yanomamö man participates in a killing, he must undergo a purification ritual and henceforth wears the cultural label unokai. In a series of publications, Chagnon (1990: 95, 1992a: 205, 1992b: 239-240; see also Chagnon, 2010) reiterated that unokais average more than two-and-half times the number of wives and more than three times the number of offspring as non-unokais of the same age. Pinker (2002: 116) concludes that "if that payoff was typical of the pre-state societies in which humans evolved, the strategic use of violence would have been selected over evolutionary time." A careful re-examination of the Yanomamö unokai findings and the infer-ences that have been drawn from them are important because they have been broadcast far-and-wide and have been uncritically accepted within evolutionary psychology and other fields. For example, Buss discusses the unokai reproduc-tive success findings in Evolutionary Psychology (1999) and again in The Mur-derer Next Door (2005: 35): "Humans have evolved powerful psychological adaptations that impel us to murder as a means for solving specific problems we encounter during the evolutionary battles for survival and reproduction." Harris relates the killers-have-more-offspring finding in The Nurture Assumption. In U.S. News and World Report, a journalist proposed that Chagnon's study "lends new credence" to the idea that "war arises from individuals struggling for reproductive success" (Allman, 1988: 57). Pinker reiterates the findings in How the Mind Works (1997) and again in The Blank Slate (2002).

Although the role of individual differences for political attitudes is undisputed, the psychological determinants of support for democratic values received limited attention. This study aimed at incorporating a variety of measures of stable individual differences and determining their relative effect on support for democratic values as well as at testing a new predictor, i.e. normative identity style. The analysis of a survey in a sample of middle adolescents (N = 1341; 16–17 year olds) showed that (a) right-wing authoritarianism, interpersonal trust, normative identity style, and empathy were good predictors of support for democratic values, (b) empathy and authoritarianism were the strongest predictors of democratic commitments, and that (c) self-esteem was not related to support for democratic values.

Although it is generally assumed that support for democratic values and beliefs develops as a result of social learning, the concrete socializing circumstances through which this occurs are less obvious. This study investigated the relationship between democratic family functioning and democratic values of adolescents. Adolescents' (N = 1,341, 16- to 17-year-olds) reports on their parents' psychological control, autonomy granting, warmth, and behavioural control were considered predictors of adolescents' democratic orientation. The results demonstrated that the democratic functioning of families was positively related to adolescents' support for democratic values when controlling for the effects of gender, political experience, authoritarianism, empathy, and political activism. Additionally, this study examined the possible role of empathy as a mediator in the relation between democratic family functioning and adolescent's democratic values. The results show that empathy was a partial mediator of a family's contribution to adolescents' democratic orientation.

Theories on empathy development have stressed the role of socialization in general and the role of parental support in particular. This 3-wave longitudinal study of middle adolescents (N = 678) aimed to contribute to the extant research on the socialization of empathy (a) by examining the relative contribution of perceived maternal and paternal need supportive parenting on over-time changes in adolescents' emotional and cognitive aspects of empathy (i.e., empathic concern and perspective taking, respectively) and (b) by considering the possibility of reciprocal relations between perceived parenting and adolescent empathy. Whereas paternal need support consistently predicted over-time changes in perspective taking in both sons and daughters, perceived maternal need support predicted changes in empathic concern among daughters only. In addition, although less consistently so, empathy dimensions also predicted over-time changes in perceived parenting. Results are discussed in terms of the nature of empathy and in the light of domain-specific effects of each parent.