Minimal Group Effects on Children's Deception
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous research has claimed that the mere assignment of individuals to arbitrary groups - such as those wearing the same T-Shirt colour - is enough to elicit ingroup bias in children, leading them to favor their own group in various social decisions (see Dunham et al., 2018, for a review). Notably, participants have been found to be more willing to engage in deception when it benefits their ingroup, as opposed to the outgroup (e.g., Dunham et al., 2011; Sierksma et al., 2019). However, these findings predominantly stem from WEIRD populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), including countries like the USA, Canada, Australia, and parts of Europe, raising questions about their cross-cultural generalizability. The present study investigates minimal group effects on prosocial deception in a cross-cultural context by comparing children with a core age range from 5 to 10 from Namibia and Germany. These two countries were selected as comparison contexts because they represent distinct cultural models of socialization: Germany emphasizes psychological autonomy, encouraging independence and self-expression, while Namibia – particularly in Bantu communities- emphasizes hierarchical relatedness, promoting obedience and respect for authority (Keller, 2018). Our goal is to examine whether minimal group membership similarly influences children's willingness to deceive for the benefit of others across these diverse cultural settings. Children will be assigned to one of two minimal groups (i.e., yellow or green) and asked to participate in a private die-rolling task across three rounds. In each round, they will have the opportunity to cheat in order to gain resources either for themselves, for a peer from their ingroup, or for a peer from the outgroup. This design allows us to assess how group membership modulates prosocial deception in both cultural contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".