Children back group claims over evidence, but privacy reduces bias, experiments reveal

Imagine two groups of young children, differentiated only by whether they wear green or orange T-shirts. Researchers at New York University wanted to know: would these kids stick with their own team, even if the evidence said otherwise?

The answer, according to a new study published in the journal Cognition, is yes. Children as young as 5 years old often sided with their own group's claims about what they saw — even when their own eyes told a different story.

But here's where it gets interesting. The researchers, led by psychology professor Andrei Cimpian, also found a simple fix: when children could answer privately, or when they were rewarded for getting the truth right, the bias disappeared almost completely.

The study involved three separate experiments with children ages 5 to 9. In the first, children picked whether they wanted to wear green or orange T-shirts, creating an "ingroup." Then they watched cartoon characters from each group make conflicting claims about ambiguous pictures — say, an animal that looked equally like a horse and a cow. Children who had been assigned to a group were significantly more likely to believe their own group's character, regardless of what the image actually showed.

But in the second and third experiments, the researchers tried something different. When children were told their answers would be private, they stopped aligning with their group and started reporting what they actually saw. Similarly, when children were offered bigger prizes for getting answers correct, they focused on accuracy instead of loyalty.

"Partisanship may start not as a conviction about what's true, but as a way of showing you belong or you're loyal to your group," said Bethany Lassetter, the study's first author and a former postdoctoral fellow at NYU. "But there's an encouraging implication here, too: Conditions that reward accuracy or that lower the social stakes of an answer can pull people back toward the evidence."

The team, which also included Natalie Hutchins from the University of Virginia and Lucas Butler from the University of Maryland, College Park, say their findings offer a glimmer of hope for understanding where political partisanship comes from — and perhaps how to soften it. If young children's bias is driven by a desire to fit in rather than by genuine belief, then environments that make it safer to speak honestly could make a real difference.