Belonging to a group with shared ideology leads preschool children to resist revising their beliefs despite disconfirming evidence.

In three studies with 4- to 5-year-old children, belief-contingent group membership linked to a shared causal claim makes children resist revising incorrect endorsements after disconfirming evidence.

• Why it matters: The work addresses how ideology-based affiliation can outweigh evidence, a pattern previously shown in adults, and tests whether the same resistance begins in early childhood.
• What they did: Children learned a novel causal claim, then were randomly assigned to join groups where membership depended on that shared belief, versus controls where the belief was shared but not membership-contingent, or framed as a guess.
• The result: After receiving evidence the initial claim was wrong, only the belief-contingent condition led children to keep and act on the incorrect endorsement, implying early affiliative motives can override truth-seeking.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.