As we move closer to Election Day 2026, voting preferences are moving back into focus, and with it, analyses of what drives partisanship at the polls. However, asked less often is when Americans show evidence of partisan behavior: shortly or well after turning legal voting age? As teenagers? In elementary school?

A team of psychology researchers has found evidence of partisan behavior in children aged five to nine. They frequently endorsed their own group’s claims even when evidence suggested otherwise, indicating group affiliation influenced their responses. However, the scientists also uncovered a potential remedy to such responses: when incentivized to tell the truth about what they had seen, or when they could provide answers under the veil of privacy, the children were much less likely to adopt their own group’s claims.

“Even young children will side with their group over the evidence of their own eyes, but mainly when they’re responding publicly and when being accurate doesn’t count for much,” explains Andrei Cimpian, a psychology professor at New York University and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal Cognition. “However, if you allow them to respond in private or give them a reason to care about accuracy, the partisanship effect disappears.”

“Partisanship may start not as a conviction about what’s true, but as a way of showing you belong or you’re loyal to your group,” observes first author Bethany Lassetter, an NYU postdoctoral fellow at the time of the study. “But there’s an encouraging implication here too: conditions that reward accuracy or that lower the social stakes of an answer can pull people back toward the evidence.”

Three Experiments With T-Shirt Groups

The study included different groups of children, aged five to nine, across three experiments. In the first, children were introduced to two groups, the green group and the orange group, differentiated only by the color of their t-shirts, and chose which group they wanted to join. Children then saw pairs of fictional characters, one from their group and one from the other group, who made conflicting claims about objects with ambiguous identities, such as an animal that looked equally like a horse and a cow. Compared to children in a control condition, children placed in a group were significantly more likely to endorse the claims made by their own group’s character, regardless of what the images actually depicted.

To determine whether children were siding with their group because they thought it was accurate, or simply out of loyalty, the researchers ran two further experiments. In one, children were told their answers would be communicated privately. In another, children could earn a bigger prize the more answers they got correct, testing whether incentives to tell the truth would outweigh group identification. The impact of privacy and truth incentives was clear: children who answered privately were more likely to accurately report what they saw than those who answered publicly, and those given a truth incentive were more likely to accurately report what they saw than those who received none.

Taken together, the experiments indicated that children’s partisanship appears to be less about a search for truth and more about a desire for social connection, the authors conclude, pointing to potential remedies for diminishing responses not supported by evidence.

“Understanding these early tendencies, and the conditions under which they intensify, diminish, or solidify into genuine belief, may ultimately help explain how group-based distortions in belief take hold and how they might be mitigated,” the authors write.

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Journal: Cognition
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106629
Article Title: Investigating the origins of partisanship: What motivates children to preferentially endorse their ingroups’ claims?
Publication Date: 3-Jul-2026