kids, minimal group affiliations and intergroup bias

Here’s an interesting piece extending Tajfel et al by studying 5-year-olds and intergroup bias: “Consequences of ‘‘Minimal’’ Group Affiliations in Children” Child Development.  So, do 5-year-olds have a bias toward members of their in-group, even if they are arbitrarily assigned to these groups?  They do.

Interesting paper.  The paper also raises questions about whether in-group bias is learned (“enculturation,” Spielman, 2000), or whether it perhaps is an evolutionary-survival-type thing, or something driven by expectations of reciprocity or competition. Or something else.

Here’s the 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 in-group or out-group children. Despite an absence of information regarding the relative status of groups or any competitive context, in-group 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 in-group members (Experiment 3). Implications for the developmental origins of intergroup bias are discussed.