Abstract
We investigate young children’s sensitivity to minimal group membership. Previous research has suggested that children do not show sensitivity to minimal cues to group membership until the age of five to six, contributing to claims that this is an important transition in the development of intergroup cognition and behavior. In this study, we investigated whether even younger children are sensitive to minimal cues to group membership. Random assignment to one of either of two color groups created a temporary, visually salient minimal group membership in 3 and 4-year-old study participants. Using explicit measures, we tested whether children preferred minimal group members when making social judgments. We find that, in the absence of any knowledge regarding the two groups, children expressed greater liking for ingroup than outgroup targets. Moreover, children estimated that ingroup members would share their preferences. Our findings demonstrate that from early in development, humans assess unknown others on the basis of minimal cues to social similarity and that the perception of group boundaries potentially underlies social assortment in strangers.
Highlights
Humans have evolved to live within large and complex social systems and they are exceptional in the extent to which they engage in cooperative exchange [1,2]
Such minimal similarities are related to ingroup favoritism, i.e. the tendency to identify with social groups and to favor members of one’s own group over those of a different group
Even entirely meaningless groupings were sufficient to elicit favoritism for similar ingroup members, a robust finding across a variety of measures
Summary
Humans have evolved to live within large and complex social systems and they are exceptional in the extent to which they engage in cooperative exchange [1,2]. Even without any prior interaction experiences or specific knowledge about the other, adults show consistent tendencies to prefer those with whom they share even a slight, seemingly arbitrary feature that can serve as the basis for social categorization. Such minimal similarities are related to ingroup favoritism, i.e. the tendency to identify with social groups and to favor members of one’s own group (the “ingroup”) over those of a different group (the “outgroup”). Even entirely meaningless groupings were sufficient to elicit favoritism for similar ingroup members, a robust finding across a variety of measures (see [11] for a meta-analytic review)
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