Of course they'd say that! Children's reasoning about potentially biased claims about groups

Abstract

This study examined how 150 6- to 13-year-old children reason about valenced group-based testimony (e.g., “Gorps are not very nice”) in a novel intergroup context. We investigated children’s developing ability to integrate the social group membership of an informant into their reasoning about testimony across three interrelated tasks. First, children’s expectations of what someone will say about their in-group and out-group were examined. Second, we assessed whether children’s willingness to believe group-based testimony varied by the group membership of the informant and the testimony’s valence. Third, we explored when children chose to share group-based testimony with an impartial student. Results showed that (1) children expect someone to say something nice about their in-group and something not nice about their out-group; (2) the ability to detect informant bias develops around 10-years-old, and varies by the valence of a testimony and the group-membership of the informant; and (3) children’s decisions to share testimony is only sometimes aligned with their belief in that testimony. Together, these results highlight the complicated ways in which social group membership influences what we expect people to say, what we choose to believe, and our decisions about what information to pass on to others.