Of Affect and Ambiguity: The Emergence of Preference for Arbitrary Ingroups

What cognitive and affective processes underlie the all‐too‐human tendency toward group‐based affiliation and exclusion? Using a paradigm in which children are randomly assigned to previously unfamiliar and meaningless “minimal” social groups, we investigate the developmental origins of the tendency to prefer and positively evaluate the actions of social ingroup members. Using a procedure derived from evaluative priming as well as children's verbal descriptions of intergroup encounters, we show that 6‐year olds but not 3‐year olds manifest robust ingroup preference. These results suggest that the mechanisms underlying the wide range of human social group affiliations undergoes a striking increase in generality between ages 3 and 6, perhaps driven by a shift from an individual‐level to a group‐level or “sociocentric” orientation.