The role of intergroup biases in children’s endorsement of information about novel individuals

Highlights

• We explored the role of intergroup biases in children’s learning about agents.

• Overall, children showed a positivity bias by mostly endorsing positive testimony.

• Children endorsed positive testimony more for ingroups than they did for outgroups.

• Evaluations of ingroups were endorsed selectively based on positive testimony.

• Evaluations of outgroups were endorsed selectively based on ingroups’ testimony.

Abstract

A great body of evidence suggests that children are remarkably selective in accepting information from different sources. Yet, very few studies have focused on children’s learning about the attributes of others. In three experiments, we examined how 6- and 7-year-olds’ ingroup and outgroup biases about novel target individuals and their biases to follow ingroup informants interact in social learning contexts. Overall, children exhibited a positivity bias, accepting positive testimony about ingroup and outgroup targets, but this bias was significantly higher for ingroup targets. Furthermore, whereas children accepted the positive testimony about ingroup targets regardless of the informant’s group membership, children selectively relied on ingroup informants when endorsing information about outgroup targets. These results suggest that children’s existing biases interact with their acquisition of knowledge in complex ways and shape their social evaluations. These findings may have important implications for developing strategies to prevent negative biases against outgroup individuals among children.

Introduction

As novices in many subjects, children acquire much of their knowledge from the individuals around them. Previous studies on children’s social learning have contributed significantly to our understanding of the cues children use when selectively endorsing information provided by others about the labeling and operation of novel objects (e.g., Birch et al., 2008, Corriveau and Harris, 2009a, Corriveau and Harris, 2009b, Corriveau et al., 2013). Relatively little is known, however, about how children learn from others about the social world, in particular about the attributes of novel individuals. Investigating children’s strategies for knowledge acquisition in the social domain is important because it can contribute to our understanding of the principles according to which children’s perceptions of other agents are formed and can possibly be modified, particularly given that children already exhibit certain biases regarding novel agents that are based on various cues—cues that mark social group membership, for instance (e.g., Baron and Dunham, 2015, Kinzler et al., 2007). In the present study, we asked whether and how children’s existing biases for evaluating ingroup and outgroup individuals change in the light of information provided by ingroup or outgroup informants.

Learning from others is valuable because it allows one to attain information that no one has direct access to and to avoid a costly trial-and-error exploration process. Although the social means of learning are particularly crucial for young children, they can potentially lead to erroneous information if the source of the information is not reliable. Consequently, choosing the right individual to learn from is critical for acquiring useful and accurate information. Previous research suggests that young children and even infants are selective when endorsing information from different sources (for a review, see Poulin-Dubois & Brosseau-Liard, 2016). In a typical procedure used in this line of research, children are presented with two informants who differ in certain attributes and who offer conflicting information about a certain object (e.g., labeling the object differently, operating the object in different ways). They are then asked to endorse information coming from one of the informants (Jaswal & Neely, 2006). Studies using similar paradigms reveal that one important cue that children rely on is the past accuracy of the informant (Birch et al., 2008, Brooker and Poulin-Dubois, 2013, Corriveau and Harris, 2009a, Corriveau and Harris, 2009b, Jaswal and Neely, 2006, Koenig and Harris, 2005, Lucas et al., 2013). When children have no opportunity to directly evaluate the accuracy of an informant, they attend to other cues that inform them indirectly about the informant’s reliability. For instance, children trust informants who are confident in their knowledge (Jaswal & Malone, 2007), who provide solid reasoning for the information they give (Corriveau and Kurkul, 2014, Koenig, 2012), and who are specialized in the particular domain of the information that was provided (Kushnir, Vredenburgh, & Schneider, 2013). Children also rely on consensus; they tend to trust information coming from the majority as opposed to a dissenter (Corriveau, Fusaro, & Harris, 2009). Finally, children are sensitive to informants’ group membership and favor information provided by ingroup individuals rather than outgroup individuals (Buttelmann et al., 2013, Corriveau et al., 2013, Kinzler et al., 2011).

Unlike information about objects, information about individuals is often subjective and context dependent; it can nevertheless help children to learn efficiently about the complex social world. Studies focusing on children’s learning about other individuals suggest that children are selective and that they consider the past accuracy and expertise of the informants also when learning about agents (Boseovski and Thurman, 2014, Boseovski, 2012). In addition to informant characteristics, children’s endorsement of information is also influenced by a “positivity bias,” a tendency to expect agents to possess positive personality characteristics (Boseovski et al., 2009, Mezulis et al., 2004, Rholes and Ruble, 1986). A positivity bias is observed in children from 3 years of age onward (for a review, see Boseovski, 2010). It can manifest itself as a propensity to focus more on positive information than on negative information about oneself and others (e.g., Benenson and Dweck, 1986, Boseovski et al., 2009, Heyman and Gelman, 1998, Rholes and Ruble, 1984) or to assume that positive attributes are more stable than negative attributes (Heyman & Giles, 2004). Remarkably, this bias can be so robust that, in some cases, children continue to attribute positive characteristics to agents despite their past negative behaviors (Rholes & Ruble, 1986). Positivity bias has also been demonstrated using a social learning paradigm where children aged 3–7 years were shown to be more likely to endorse the testimony of an informant when that informant made a positive trait attribution about an individual (Boseovski, 2012). Extending this bias to nonhuman agents, 6- to 7.5-year-olds prefer to endorse positive testimony about a novel animal, even when an expert provides conflicting negative testimony about it (Boseovski & Thurman, 2014).

Previous research suggests, however, that a positivity bias might not apply to the same degree to all agents in children’s environment. For instance, preschool children are sensitive to markers of social category membership such as race, gender, and language or even arbitrary markers such as T-shirt color, and they tend to prefer individuals who belong to the same category as themselves (e.g., Aboud, 1988, Dunham et al., 2011, Kinzler et al., 2007, Martin, 1989). At around 4 years of age, children also attribute more positive characteristics to ingroup individuals than to outgroup individuals (Aboud, 2003, Bigler and Liben, 1993, Dunham et al., 2011, Over et al., 2018). Negative biases toward outgroup individuals, on the other hand, are generally reported to emerge later, at around 6 years of age (Aboud, 2003, Baron and Banaji, 2006, Baron and Dunham, 2015, Brewer, 1999, Buttelmann and Böhm, 2014, Kowalski and Lo, 2001, Martin, 1989, Rutland et al., 2007), but some evidence suggests that, in socially homogeneous environments, they can be observed between 3 and 5 years of age (Rutland, Cameron, Bennett, & Ferrell, 2005). Importantly, intergroup biases influence children’s learning about the attributes of novel individuals. For instance, 5- to 9-year-olds’ intergroup attitudes predict how they remember information about novel members of different groups (Averhart and Bigler, 1997, Nesdale and Brown, 2004). Similar effects are shown using a minimal group paradigm; whereas children aged 6–8 years can make negative predictions about ingroup members on learning about their negative actions, the effect of the negative information is attenuated for ingroup members but is enhanced for outgroup members (Baron & Dunham, 2015). These tendencies are explained by mechanisms such as processing information differently depending on whether it is consistent with existing stereotypes (e.g., Koblinsky et al., 1978, Kropp and Halverson, 1983, Liben and Signorella, 1980) and maintaining one’s self-esteem by emphasizing positive attributes about one’s group membership (e.g., Tajfel & Turner, 2004).

In sum, whereas children expect agents to possess positive attributes (e.g., Mezulis et al., 2004), their existing biases about ingroup and outgroup members affect how they evaluate information about novel individuals (Averhart and Bigler, 1997, Baron and Dunham, 2015, Dunham et al., 2011, Nesdale and Brown, 2004). Previous research has established that children show a positivity bias in selective social learning situations (Boseovski, 2012, Landrum et al., 2013, Lapan et al., 2016), yet the role of intergroup biases in children’s learning about agents remains unexplored in a similar context. The present study extends previous research by asking how children learn about novel ingroup and outgroup agents through testimony and whether and how children’s existing biases (e.g., positivity bias, intergroup attitudes) change in the light of information from ingroup and outgroup informants.

Experiment 1 explored whether 6- and 7-year-old children’s willingness to endorse positive and negative testimony about novel individuals would differ depending on the target individuals’ group membership. The age group was determined based on previous research showing that negative biases toward outgroup individuals generally emerge at around 6 years of age (e.g., Aboud, 2003, Baron and Banaji, 2006, Baron and Dunham, 2015, Brewer, 1999, Buttelmann and Böhm, 2014, Kowalski and Lo, 2001, Martin, 1989, Rutland et al., 2007). We adapted a method that has been used previously to explore children’s endorsement of positive and negative testimony about novel agents (Boseovski, 2012). Children were introduced to two informants and one target (all college-aged adults). The group membership of the targets was marked by the language they spoke (French or Turkish) (e.g., Buttelmann et al., 2013, Corriveau et al., 2013, Kinzler et al., 2011). Participating children in all experiments were monolingual Turkish speakers living in Turkey. No information about the informants’ group membership was given. After being presented with contradictory evaluations of a target (being nice vs. being mean), children were asked to endorse one of these evaluations. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated children’s tendency to endorse evaluations of ingroup and outgroup targets when these evaluations came from ingroup and outgroup informants. In these experiments, the group membership of both the informants and targets was revealed. Again, children were asked to endorse one of the two contrasting evaluations. In Experiments 1 and 2, children were presented with female targets and informants. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 with male targets and informants in order to assess the generalizability of the findings.