Study finds 2-year-olds already expect ingroup loyalty to trump personal preferences when outgroup individuals are present

The research suggests that the human capacity to understand outward shows of ingroup loyalty emerges remarkably early.

By Sarah Steimer

When rival groups are in the picture, adults often put loyalty ahead of personal preference. They might show up to an office competition they dislike just to cheer for their team, or tolerate — if not endorse — a political ally’s claims even when these conflict with their own beliefs. But do children understand these displays of loyalty? This may not just be an adult trait: New research published in PNAS shows that children as young as 2 years expect ingroup loyalty to be prioritized over personal preferences when outgroups are present.

To explore how early these expectations come into play, Lin Bian, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, and Renée Baillargeon, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor of psychology, used the violation-of-expectation paradigm, an established method that uses looking time to test young children’s understanding of the world.

“The rationale of this paradigm is that young participants’ looking behavior can tell us what they think,” Bian says. “Children tend to look longer at events that violate their expectations. When something is surprising, they tend to pay a lot of attention to it, trying to understand what is going on. When watching an event that's relatively less surprising, they lose interest more quickly.”

The team performed three violation-of-expectation studies, in which toddlers watched interactions among a target individual, an ingroup member, and an outgroup member, with group memberships marked with novel labels. Next, the target individual sat alone while facing two toys, and demonstrated that she secretly preferred a toy endorsed by the outgroup member (outgroup-associated toy) over the toy endorsed by her ingroup member (ingroup-associated toy). In the test trials, the target individual chose between the ingroup-associated and outgroup-associated toy, either while the outgroup member remained present or after she left the scene. 

The researchers found that when the outgroup member was present during this selection process, toddlers expected the target individual to conform to her group’s norm and select the ingroup-associated toy, even with the knowledge that the target individual preferred the outgroup-associated toy. This was true whether or not the ingroup member remained in the scene: As long as the outgroup member was present, toddlers expected the target individual to select the ingroup-associated toy and no other toy. But if the outgroup member was absent, toddlers expected the target individual to select her personal preference, if any. 

The findings suggest that, by 2 years of age, toddlers believe that individuals have both a personal and a social identity, that they understand that individuals may produce different actions in different contexts depending on which identity has precedence, and that they expect individuals’ social identity to prevail in intergroup contexts — even when it conflicts with their personal identity — in a show of ingroup loyalty.

“(Showing ingroup loyalty) is very common in everyday life, but it was unclear when this understanding emerges, and whether very young children can make sense of it,” Bian says. “If children don't understand that people have both a personal identity and a social identity, they would be confused: Why would someone act one way in one context and differently in another? What we see here is that, from early on, toddlers understand shows of ingroup loyalty. The social world is not a weird place to them, they can make sense of it.”

The research shows that toddlers possess sophisticated cognitive abilities that enable them to make sense of behaviors that might otherwise appear erratic, Bian says. However, it is unclear whether this is an ability people are born with or if it develops through the limited experiences they accumulate in the first two years of life.

“What we do know,” Bian adds, “is that even in the first two years of life, children already expect people to show ingroup loyalty, even when it means sacrificing their personal preferences.” 

The researchers hope to further explore the topic by testing whether infants in their first year of life possess similar expectations of ingroup loyalty. They’re also curious to find how sophisticated this understanding of identity is in toddlers’ minds: Are they able to hold both social and personal identities in mind, or do they have a flexible ability to evoke the right identity to predict people’s actions in the right context?

“Another research direction we would like to pursue is whether early understanding of ingroup loyalty predicts later behaviors, such as one’s tendency to favor their ingroups or hold negative views of outgroup members in adulthood,” she says.

If that's the case, it could suggest that interventions to counteract harmful biases toward outgroup members should start much earlier, rather than waiting for adolescence or adulthood.