Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present studies (total n = 151) experimentally manipulated meaningfulness in novel social groups and measured anyresulting ingroup biases. Study 1 showed that even when groups were arbitrary and presumptively meaningless, 5- to8-year-olds developed equally strong ingroup biases as did children in more meaningful groups. Study 2 explored thelengths required to effectively reduce ingroup biases by stressing the arbitrariness of the grouping dimension. Even in thiscase ingroup bias persisted in resource allocation behavior, though it was attenuated on preference and similarity measures.These results suggested that one has to go to great lengths to counteract childrens tendency to imbue newly encounteredsocial groups with rich affiliative meaning.