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Stick with your group : young children's attitudes about group loyalty

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Misch_et_al_2014_attitudes_to_loyalty_AAM.pdf (1.056Mb)
Date
10/2014
Author
Misch, Antonia
Over, Harriet
Carpenter, Malinda
Keywords
Loyalty
Group membership
Group norms
Social–cognitive development
Morality
Trust
BF Psychology
BDC
R2C
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Abstract
For adults, loyalty to the group is highly valued, yet little is known about how children evaluate loyalty. We investigated children’s attitudes about loyalty in a third-party context. In the first experiment, 4- and 5-year-olds watched a video of two groups competing. Two members of the losing group then spoke. The disloyal individual said she wanted to win and therefore would join the other group. The loyal individual said she also wanted to win but would stay with her group. Children were then asked five forced-choice questions about these two individuals’ niceness, trustworthiness, morality, and deservingness of a reward. The 5-year-olds preferred the loyal person across all questions; results for the 4-year-olds were considerably weaker but in the same direction. The second experiment investigated the direction of the effect in 5-year-olds. In this experiment, children answered questions about either a loyal individual, a disloyal individual, or a neutral individual. Children rated both the loyal and neutral individuals more positively than the disloyal individual across a number of measures. Thus, whereas disloyal behavior is evaluated unfavorably by children, loyal behavior is the expected norm. These results suggest that, at least from 5 years of age, children understand that belonging to a group entails certain commitments. This marks an important step in their own ability to negotiate belonging and become trustworthy and reliable members of their social groups.
Citation
Misch , A , Over , H & Carpenter , M 2014 , ' Stick with your group : young children's attitudes about group loyalty ' , Journal of Experimental Child Psychology , vol. 126 , pp. 19-36 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2014.02.008
Publication
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2014.02.008
ISSN
0022-0965
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2014.02.008.
Description
Harriet Over was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant ES/K006702/1).
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/8391

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