Becoming Partisan: The Development of Children's Social Preferences Based on Political Markers

What political party or what presidential candidate a person supports is often used by adults to divide their social world. However, little is known about whether young children also engage in such tendencies, or whether political groups are even socially meaningful for young children. To trace the beginnings of these tendencies, the current study investigated whether 6- to 12-year-old U.S. children use political markers, such as political party affiliation and support for presidential candidates, to guide their social preferences. We also examined children’s ability to report their political affiliation, whether their political affiliation matched their parents’, how accurate they are at reporting their parents’ political affiliations, and whether having parent-child conversations about politics predicted children’s political affiliation and social preferences. We found that children as young as 6 years of age showed ingroup preferences for individuals who shared their own or their parents' political affiliations – especially based on support for presidential candidates. Notably, even if children could not report their own presidential candidate choice or were inaccurate at predicting their parents' presidential candidate choice, children still preferred people who supported the same presidential candidate as their parents. Further, children who had conversations with their parents about politics were more likely to prefer people who matched their parents’ political affiliations. This study provides the first empirical evidence that 6- to 12-year-old children are using political markers to form ingroup preferences and show rudimentary forms of political partisanship.