Can Children Be Partisan?

As a polarized nation heads toward a crucial midterm election this fall, new research from a team including a University of Maryland human development and education scholar suggests that children as young as 5 years old show early signs of partisan behavior.

The study, published last week in the journal Cognition, found that children ages 5-9 tended to favor their own group’s claims even when evidence suggested otherwise. However, the scientists also uncovered a potential remedy to such responses: When incentivized to tell the truth about what they had seen or when they could provide answers under the veil of privacy, the children were much less likely to adopt their own group’s claims.

Rather than political messaging, the researchers used colored T-shirts as a marker of group identity. 

“What makes these findings informative is that they let us watch partisan tendencies take shape in a relatively stripped-down form, before political identities or ideological commitments are anywhere in the picture,” said Lucas Butler, an associate professor in UMD’s Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology and a member of the Maryland Democracy Initiative. “That points to some of the basic social machinery partisanship is built on.”

The research team was led by Andrei Cimpian, a psychology professor at New York University; first author Bethany Lassetter, an NYU postdoctoral fellow at the time of the study; and Natalie Hutchins, currently a doctoral student at the University of Virginia. 

In their experiments, children were introduced to two groups, green and orange, differentiated only by their T-shirt color, and were asked which they wanted to be in. The children saw several pairs of fictional characters, one from their group and one from the other group, who made conflicting claims about objects with ambiguous identities (for example, an animal that looked equally like a horse and a cow). Children were asked what they thought the pictured objects were (a horse or a cow?).

Overall, children in a green or orange group were significantly more likely to endorse the claims made by their group’s character about what the pictures showed than those in a control group (not introduced to a color grouping) —regardless of what images actually depicted. 

These results raised a key question: Were children siding with their group because they thought the group was accurate or, instead, because they wanted to be loyal and go along with what their group said? 

To examine this, the authors asked another group of children, aged 6 to 9, to undertake the same experimental task. This time, however, the children were told their answers would be communicated privately. And in a third experiment, with another sample of children aged 6 to 9, children were put into three groups: One group received the experimental treatment identical to the first experiment, and the others were told either that the more answers they got correct, the bigger the prize they would receive at the end, or that the more answers their group got correct, the bigger the prize their group would receive at the end. This was a way of testing if incentives to tell the truth would outweigh the pressure to display group loyalty.

The impact of privacy and “truth incentives” was clear: When children answered privately, they no longer favored their own group’s claims, reporting instead what the images actually showed. Similarly, those in the truth-incentive group were more likely to accurately report what they saw than were those who received a partisan incentive or no incentive.

Lassetter noted the potential significance of the latter finding in offering insight into the developmental origins of political partisanship.

“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,” she said. “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.”

This article is based on a news release by New York University News staff.