Children’s expectations about conventional and moral behaviors of ingroup and outgroup members

Abstract

Although children demonstrate robust social preferences for ingroup members early in ontogeny, it is not yet clear whether these preferences are based on children generally liking people who are more familiar or on children holding specific biased beliefs about people in their ingroup as compared with people in their outgroup. Here, we investigated the origins of humans’ propensity to link ingroup members with positive behaviors and outgroup members with negative behaviors by asking whether linguistic group membership influences children’s expectations of how people will act. Our findings indicate that the effect of group membership on children’s expectations about other people’s actions varies across both domain (moral and conventional) and age. Whereas all children in our study (3- to 11-year-olds) expected ingroup members to be more likely to conform to social conventions and expected outgroup members to be more likely to break conventional rules, only older children (7- to 11-year-olds) used social group membership to form expectations about which people would be more likely to act morally versus immorally. Thus, younger children do not automatically form biased character judgments based on group membership, although they do understand that social group membership is particularly relevant for reasoning about which people will be more likely to act in line with social norms.