The role of inter-group biases in children‘s acquisition of information about others‘ personality characteristics

Abstract

Studies conducted on social learning of children showed that children acquire knowledge from others selectively. However, as most of these studies focused on the knowledge acquisition about nonsocial elements, there is a lack of research on learning about social elements of the world, such as other individuals. Research in this domain might be important in terms of understanding how children‘s world views on other social entities are formed. The present study is an attempt to expand our understanding in learning about other‘s personality characteristics. We aimed to understand how children‘s biases about individuals from different social groups interact with the ingroup bias that they display in social learning situations. The first set of studies was conducted with 6-7 year-olds. Results suggested that although children displayed more positivity bias for their in-groups, when an in-group informant gave a positive testimony for an out-group individual, the same amount of positivity bias with in-groups was shown for this individual. The second set of studies was conducted with 4-5 year-olds. Results showed that even though children preferred in-groups as play-mates, they changed this preference when an in-group informant gave positive testimony about an out-group individual; however children, particularly girls, were more reluctant to change their initial preferences when the informant was an out-group member. These results suggest that children‘s inclinations in social preference and social learning are directed not by in-group favoritism or out-group aversion alone, instead these two biases interact and modify children‘s initial tendencies according to the circumstances.