Stick with your group: Young children’s attitudes about group loyalty

Abstract

For adults, loyalty to the group is highly valued, yet little is known about how children evaluate loyalty. We investigated children's attitudes about loyalty in a third-party context. In the first experiment, 4- and 5-year-olds watched a video of two groups competing. Two members of the losing group then spoke. The disloyal individual said she wanted to win and therefore would join the other group. The loyal individual said she also wanted to win but would stay with her group. Children were then asked five forced-choice questions about these two individuals' niceness, trustworthiness, morality, and deservingness of a reward. The 5-year-olds preferred the loyal person across all questions; results for the 4-year-olds were considerably weaker but in the same direction. The second experiment investigated the direction of the effect in 5-year-olds. In this experiment, children answered questions about either a loyal individual, a disloyal individual, or a neutral individual. Children rated both the loyal and neutral individuals more positively than the disloyal individual across a number of measures. Thus, whereas disloyal behavior is evaluated unfavorably by children, loyal behavior is the expected norm. These results suggest that, at least from 5 years of age, children understand that belonging to a group entails certain commitments. This marks an important step in their own ability to negotiate belonging and become trustworthy and reliable members of their social groups.

Preschoolers value those who sanction non-cooperators

“…This is consistent with the finding from Kenward and Östh (2012) that 4-year-olds did not identify more with punishers than with non-punishers of first-order transgressors, and suggests that the propensity to value norm enforcement and enforcers may emerge between 4 and 5 years of age. This developmental shift is in line with other recent studies that have employed comparable methods and also found that whereas 5-year-olds demonstrate a robust grasp of rather sophisticated cooperation and group norms, 4-year-olds do not (Misch et al, 2014;. This developmental shift may reflect the fact that as children's interactions with strangers and peers and their experiences with group life (e.g., in kindergarten) increase, so too does their awareness of the importance of following and enforcing norms of cooperation (cf.…”

“…This developmental shift may reflect the fact that as children's interactions with strangers and peers and their experiences with group life (e.g., in kindergarten) increase, so too does their awareness of the importance of following and enforcing norms of cooperation (cf. Misch et al, 2014;.…”

“…Our study design cannot tease these possibilities apart as we compared children's responses to enforcers versus non-enforcers. Future work will need to compare children's responses to enforcers versus neutral (e.g., naïve) individuals as well as non-enforcers versus neutral individuals in order to provide insights on this question (see, e.g., Misch et al, 2014;Vaish, Grossmann, & Woodward, 2008).…”

“…In those studies, 5-year-olds evaluated positively, preferred, and distributed more resources to (a) a moral transgressor who displayed remorse more than one who displayed no remorse , and (b) a loyal group member more than a disloyal one (Misch et al, 2014), whereas 4-yearolds did not. Because the present study was also concerned with children's emerging understanding of rather sophisticated norms of cooperation and because our method was adapted from these prior studies, we expected that 5-year-old children should evaluate positively, prefer, and distribute more resources to enforcers than non-enforcers, whereas 4-year-olds may not yet show these effects (as also hinted at by the results of Kenward and Östh (2012)).…”

“…The decision to test 4-and 5-year-olds was guided by relevant prior research in which children of similar ages were successfully tested using a similar procedure and which was also concerned with children's understanding of relatively complex cooperation and group norms (Misch, Over, & Carpenter, 2014;Vaish, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2011). In those studies, 5-year-olds evaluated positively, preferred, and distributed more resources to (a) a moral transgressor who displayed remorse more than one who displayed no remorse , and (b) a loyal group member more than a disloyal one (Misch et al, 2014), whereas 4-yearolds did not.…”