Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.