Belfast Children: Some Effects of a Conflict Environment

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Abstract
A sample of 60 boys aged 6 and 10, and divided equally into Catholics and Protestants, was drawn from two schools in ‘troubled’ Belfast areas; a comparable control sample was obtained in Edinburgh. The children were given a series of four game-like tasks, half of which were devised to tap social attitudes and the remainder more general cognitive functioning. The results clearly bring out some of the effects of a climate of hostility and violence on the development of Belfast children; their specific ethnocentrism was high from an early age, and it would seem that more remote cognitive processes were also affected. Some of the theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.