Consequences of “Minimal” Group Affiliations in Children

Abstract

Three experiments (total N = 140) tested the hypothesis that 5-year-old children’s membership in randomly assigned ‘minimal’ groups would be sufficient to induce intergroup bias. Children were randomly assigned to groups and engaged in tasks involving judgments of unfamiliar ingroup or outgroup children. Despite an absence of information regarding the relative status of groups or any competitive context, ingroup preferences were observed on explicit and implicit measures of attitude and resource allocation (Experiment 1), behavioral attribution, and expectations of reciprocity, with preferences persisting when groups were not described via a noun label (Experiment 2). In addition, children systematically distorted incoming information by preferentially encoding positive information about ingroup members (Experiment 3). Implications for the developmental origins of intergroup bias are discussed.

Children draw more affiliative pictures following priming with third-party ostracism.

“…Five-year-olds have more experience interacting with social groups than do 4-year-olds, and have been shown to be very sensitive to group membership more generally (Dunham, Baron, & Carey, 2011). Thus it was predicted that the older children would likely show a stronger difference between conditions than the younger children.…”

Young children seek out biased information about social groups

“…For example, they tend to remember more positive information about ingroups and tend to interpret ambiguous intergroup interactions in ways that favor the ingroup (Dunham et al, 2011;Dunham & Emory, 2014). Even more profoundly, we argue that children can be considered active consumers of information who make choices regarding what they consume.…”

“…We test this prediction with five-and six-year-old children, the age at which sensitivity to minimal groups begins to be robust (Dunham et al, 2011;Dunham & Emory, 2014;Spielman, 2000). More generally, because children have recently joined school and have increasing opportunity to choose the type of information they consume though storybooks and other media, this is a particularly important period to examine how their choices influence the development of intergroup attitudes.…”

Beyond Discrete Categories: Studying Multiracial, Intersex, and Transgender Children Will Strengthen Basic Developmental Science

“…But at the very least, it seems clear that children who provide answers that deviate from this norm are not necessarily incorrect and that a child who has a different gender experience or knowledge of a different experience (e.g., the sibling of a gender-nonconforming child) than most is not automatically disordered or confused in some way (e.g., Fast & Olson, under review). As way of analogy, most children favor members of their social groups, even arbitrarily assigned ones (e.g., Dunham, Baron, & Carey, 2011)-this response is statistically the most common response-yet we would not argue that a child who violates this norm-for example, a child who showed no group bias-is incorrect, deviant, or otherwise problematic.…”