This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: 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. 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.
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