joshuaconfer.bsky.social

(8/8) The full paper is open access @natcomms.nature.com! Huge thanks to my amazing co-authors Allison Champ, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, & @janengelmann.bsky.social

(7/8) By preschool age, children selectively weigh evidence according to what their group believes. This suggests it might be helpful to start early in intervening on the psychological processes that make it hard for different groups to agree on basic facts.

(6/8) Across studies, analyses indicated that children did not blindly adopt group beliefs but instead reasoned their way to them.

(5/8) Children who did not belong to a group rationally evaluated the same sets of evidence and tended to arrive at accurate conclusions.

(4/8) Children who joined a group showed three key biases: they inspected less evidence to reach a conclusion when the evidence supported their group’s belief; were more convinced by group-supporting evidence; and held onto group beliefs more strongly in the face of group-opposing evidence.

(3/8) Across three studies, children either belonged to one of two groups or no group, and then solved a reasoning task. After hearing both groups’ beliefs about the task, children evaluated the available evidence themselves.

(2/8) Decades of research suggest that when children reason individually, they are like ‘little scientists’ who are open-minded, flexible, and curious. What happens when they reason as a member of a social group?

Why do otherwise rational people disagree about the same evidence? Our new paper finds that group membership is a deeply rooted influence on how we form beliefs, leading even preschoolers to bias their evidential standards and form inaccurate beliefs.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...