The Impact of Group Membership on Children’s Choices

Abstract

The present study tested how children view ingroup members, outgroup members, and people whose group membership is ambiguous. Each child was assigned to a novel group (orange or green) and played a dictator game, in which they were given four videos and were told that they could give all, some, or none of their videos to another person: an ingroup member, an outgroup member or an ambiguous person. Results indicated that the children in every group gave away roughly equal amounts of videos to the ingroup, outgroup and ambiguous group. Yet, children did report liking the ingroup more than the outgroup. Unexpectedly, some children reported preferring the outgroup over the ingroup; to further clarify this finding, we divided the children into three further groups: ingroup-favoring, outroup-favoring, and no preference. In both the ingroup-favoring and outgroup-favoring groups, children gave more videos to the group that they favored. The ingroup-favoring and outgroup-favoring children both gave a similar amount of videos to the ambiguous individuals as they gave to the group they favored. This study provides insight into how children view the social world around them and has implications for how to encourage children not to divide people into categories