Children's Intergroup Attribution Bias for Liked and Disliked Peers

To find an intergroup bias with nonethnic peer social groups, the author asked 30 children from New Zealand to make attributions about both positive and negative behaviors performed by both someone they liked and by someone they disliked. In line with predictions, the children produced (a) more dispositional attributions for friends performing positive behaviors and for someone disliked performing negative behaviors and (b) more situational attributions for friends performing negative behaviors and for someone disliked performing positive behaviors. The results show that the intergroup attribution bias generalizes to the important domain of peer relations and that children's narrative accounts can be biased depending upon group membership.