Children and adults think truth-seeking should prevail over partisanship.

People must sometimes choose between seeking accurate beliefs and upholding partisan beliefs. How do people evaluate individuals who diverge from an inaccurate ingroup consensus in their pursuit of truth? To answer this question, we conducted two preregistered studies with adults and 6- to 9-year-old children from the United States (N = 632). Participants evaluated information-seeking, belief change, belief stasis, and outgroup belief endorsement in scenarios involving conflicting intergroup ideologies, in which adopting a new belief entailed a departure from an ingrained belief held by fellow group members. Both adults and children praised others for pursuing the truth through information-seeking and belief revision and for telling others that an evidence-based outgroup belief is correct. However, these positive evaluations were less pronounced for real-world, politically divisive issues in which participants' own political group's beliefs were at stake (Study 1), as compared to hypothetical situations involving fictional groups and novel beliefs (Study 2). Overall, these results indicate that people think it is generally desirable for others to pursue accuracy even at the cost of group loyalty, and this is true by the age of 6. Thus, the formation and retention of unsupported partisan beliefs may frequently be misaligned with the epistemic values that people reflectively endorse. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Duke Scholars

Author Walter Sinnott-Armstrong Philosophy