Most preschool boys in a Norwegian experiment chose a character from the bigger cartoon group

A 22-point gap between boys and girls ^[19], with only the boys' rate clearly above chance ^[5], could mean nothing more social than a taste for whatever appears most often on screen. The Oslo team ^[3] checked that with another 164 preschoolers, who saw faceless shapes scattered across the screen and moving without group coordination ^[6]. Boys and girls both picked the more numerous shape about half the time ^[6]. That suggests the cues making the original characters look like a social group mattered ^[7]. The control removed faces and coordinated movement at the same time, though, and the experiment did not establish which cue the children were responding to ^[7].

The infants showed no such preference. Beyond the reaching task, a looking-time analysis of 220 infants found attention split roughly evenly between the two groups ^[9]. None of the reported samples covers the span from 13 months to 3 years ^[20].

The adults were all white Americans, recruited so the team could study preferences among members of a dominant social group ^[11]. The thing this doesn't tell you is how Norwegian adults, or Americans outside that group, would choose. So the switch from the boys' preference for big groups to the adults' preference for small ones cannot be put down to age alone. The country and the population changed along with the age ^[10][17].

None of the cartoons carried a national, religious or party label ^[18]. Adults who were relatively more drawn to the bigger groups were still more accepting of some groups dominating others ^[14]. They were also more likely to favor using the military abroad and severe punishment for crime, and less likely to support welfare or policies that help minorities ^[14]. According to phys.org's report on the paper, those relationships were weak and do not show that group preference causes political belief ^[15]. In the final adult study, choices were unrelated to whether participants leaned left or right in general ^[16].

The authors suggest that being drawn to the stronger alliance could lay early groundwork for attitudes about one group dominating another ^[1]. On their evolutionary account, the preference lets children practice joining forces, behavior that may have helped ancestors compete for resources ^[1]. They also say biological maturation and social experience could contribute ^[2]. In our view the evidence supports two narrower findings. One is a sex difference in a preschool preference that depends on group-like cues. The other is a faint adult association with attitudes toward dominance. The children were tested in Norway and the adults in the United States, and none of the children was followed into adulthood ^[17].