Preschool boys favoured larger groups in University of Oslo study

A University of Oslo study reported on 10 October found that preschool boys in Norway tended to choose a member of a larger cartoon group over one from a smaller group. The research, published in Nature Human Behaviour on 2 October, also examined US adults and found associations between group choices and some attitudes toward social hierarchy. The findings do not establish that a child's choice predicts their later political beliefs.

How the preschool group-choice tests worked

In one task described by Phys.org, 153 children aged three to six watched animations of two groups of coloured characters with faces. One group had three members and the other had two. The groups moved separately and did not fight or interact. A member of each group then came forward, and the children chose which character they liked, wanted to play with or wanted to befriend. The setup tested a social choice made after seeing the characters as members of groups.

About 65% of boys chose the character from the larger group, compared with about 43% of girls, according to the Phys.org account. The boys' choices were above chance; the girls showed no clear preference for either group. The journal abstract reports the broader preschool finding as a preference for majority-group members among boys but not girls. That result describes the children tested and does not establish why any individual child made a choice.

The researchers also tested 164 preschoolers with shapes that lacked faces and coordinated group movement. Boys and girls chose the more numerous type of shape about half the time, Phys.org reported. That comparison suggests the result in the social task was not simply a preference for seeing more items. It does not identify which particular feature of the animated groups influenced the children's choices.

What the infant and adult results show

The journal abstract reports that 180 infants showed no comparable preference. Phys.org says those infants were aged six to 13 months and reached for puppets matching the animated characters without favouring the larger group. It also describes a separate looking-time analysis involving 220 infants in which attention was roughly evenly divided. Neither infant measure showed the preschool boys' pattern, although the tasks used different responses.

The adult studies involved 3,467 white adults living in the United States. Participants rated cartoon groups they would rather join; one study also asked which individual members they preferred to associate with. Phys.org reports that men and women favoured smaller groups overall, with the preference stronger among women. The journal abstract describes the relative difference by saying men liked the majority more than women. Those descriptions concern a difference between men and women, not an overall adult preference for large groups.

Phys.org also reports that adults perceived larger groups as more dominant, while seeing smaller groups as richer and more refined. Group size, in these responses, did not signal every kind of status in the same way. The cartoons carried no nationality, religion or political-party labels, so the choices concerned abstract groups rather than a named political movement or community.

Limits on the political-attitude finding

Among the adults, greater attraction to larger groups was associated with more acceptance of some forms of group dominance, support for military force and harsh criminal punishment, and opposition to social welfare and policies benefiting minorities, according to Phys.org. Its report calls the relationships weak; the journal abstract describes the political correlations as robust. Those differing characterisations remain unresolved in the accessible summaries. Phys.org also says choices in the final adult study were unrelated to participants' general left-right political orientation.

The researchers propose that attraction to stronger alliances could be an early building block of attitudes toward group dominance. That is an interpretation of the findings, not evidence that a preschool preference causes a later political view. The study compared different groups of Norwegian children and US adults rather than following the same people as they grew older. Whether a childhood preference lasts, and whether it relates to that person's adult beliefs, remains unanswered.

The samples also leave open how widely the findings apply beyond the children studied in Norway and the white adults studied in the United States. The accessible journal record provides the abstract, while the detailed task descriptions and percentages here come from Phys.org's account. The full paper would be needed to assess the methods and the differing descriptions of the adult political associations in more detail.