Biases about social groups emerge from a young age. This study examines whether statistically representative counterevidence – a randomly drawn sample from the social group – can change children’s attitudes and beliefs about minimally defined social groups. We found that 5- to 6-year-olds learned from the sample to change their attitudes and beliefs about minimal groups. However, they showed a negativity bias and an ingroup bias when they learned from the evidence. It was unclear whether 9- to 10-year-olds’ attitudes and beliefs can also be changed by this type of evidence. Future directions and implications of this study are discussed.

Social relationships such as playmates and friendships are im-portant for children’s development. But relatively little isknown about how such relationships are formed. In two stud-ies, 5- to 6-year-old children chose their playmates in a hypo-thetical scenario that resembled a real-world social situation.The findings suggested that children used both the base-rateinformation about the social group and the adaptive samplingstrategy in playmate choice – they approached or avoided in-dividuals based on the group that the individuals belonged to,as well as their past experiences with the individuals.