Preschool boys favor bigger groups while adults’ choices hint at political attitudes
[post_content]
Disclaimer: This article has been automatically aggregated from
Two cartoon characters appear on a screen. One belongs to a group of three, and the other to a group of two. Which character would you rather play with?
Researchers at the University of Oslo recently found that preschool boys in Norway tended to choose the larger group’s member. The choices of adults, on the other hand, differed by gender and were weakly linked to attitudes toward social inequality.
The researchers’ study was aimed at exploring when preferences for larger groups emerge and whether the choices of adults relate to political attitudes. Their findings were published in a paper in Nature Human Behaviour.
More than a numbers game
The team recruited 153 children ages 3 to 6 and showed them animations depicting two groups of colored characters with faces. Each group moved together on its own side of the screen, without fighting or interacting with the other group.
One member from each group then came forward. Children selected the character they liked most, wanted to play with or wanted to befriend.
The researchers found that about 65% of boys and 43% of girls chose the member of the larger group. Boys showed a preference beyond chance, while girls did not clearly favor either group.
To test whether boys simply preferred whichever type of character appeared more often, the researchers tested another 164 preschoolers using shapes without faces. The shapes were scattered and moved without group coordination.
Boys and girls chose the more numerous type of shape about half the time. This suggested that cues making the characters seem like a social group mattered, although the experiment did not establish which cues influenced the children’s decisions.
Among 180 infants ages 6 to 13 months, a similar experiment that involved reaching for puppets that matched the animated characters revealed no preference for characters in the larger group. An additional looking-time analysis involving 220 infants also found attention roughly evenly divided between the groups.
A different adult pattern
The researchers subsequently tried to determine whether similar patterns were observed in adults. They ran three studies involving 3,467 white adults living in the U.S., asking participants to rate which cartoon groups they would rather join. In one of these studies, they also asked which individual members they preferred to associate with.
The researchers focused on white Americans to examine preferences among members of a dominant social group. Interestingly, they found that both men and women favored smaller groups overall. This preference for smaller groups was stronger among women, producing a relative gender difference in the same direction as the preschool comparison.
A separate study found that adults perceived larger groups as more dominant, while smaller groups were perceived as richer and more refined. In the minds of adults, greater numbers therefore appeared to convey one kind of social power, rather than power or status generally.
From cartoons to politics
Although the cartoons carried no nationality-related, religious or party labels, the choices of adults exhibited small associations with attitudes toward real social hierarchies.
The team observed that adults who were relatively more attracted to larger groups were more accepting of some groups dominating others. They also tended to support military force in international affairs and harsh criminal punishment, and to oppose social welfare and policies benefiting minorities.
Notably, the relationships uncovered by the researchers were weak and do not indicate that group preferences cause political beliefs. In the final adult study, choices were unrelated to participants’ general left or right political inclinations.
The authors propose that an attraction to stronger alliances could be an early building block of attitudes toward group dominance. In their evolutionary interpretation, a preference for larger groups could help children to practice joining forces, behavior that could have helped ancestors compete for resources.
Biological maturation and social experience could also contribute to this phenomenon. However, the studies compared different people in Norway and the United States without following children into adulthood. Whether an early preference persists and relates to that person’s later beliefs remains unclear and could be explored in future research.
Written for you by our author Ingrid Fadelli, edited by Sadie Harley, and fact-checked and reviewed by Robert Egan—this article is the result of careful human work. We rely on readers like you to keep independent science journalism alive.
If this reporting matters to you, please consider a donation (especially monthly). You’ll get an ad-free account as a thank-you.
Publication details
Erik K. Fonn et al, Gendered motives for group formidability among children and adults, Nature Human Behaviour (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02606-1
© 2026 Science X Network
Citation:
Preschool boys favor bigger groups while adults’ choices hint at political attitudes (2026, October 10)
retrieved 10 October 2026
from https://phys.org/news/2026-10-preschool-boys-favor-bigger-groups.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
for informational purposes only. We do not claim ownership, accuracy, or liability for the content provided. All rights belong to the original publisher.