True Left

Toddlers Are Harsh Judges Of Moral Character

Over the past ten years, developmental psychologists have been astounded by the young age at which children appear to be aware of the moral qualities of others’ actions. At just four months, babies already react with surprise when others engage in unequal distribution of treats and resources. They also snub these unfair individuals in social interactions by the age of 24 months and expect others to do the same. Other forms of moral judgement may emerge even sooner: as early as 3 months of age, infants show distinct preferences for those who help, as opposed to hinder, others.

In thinking about these nascent moral judgements, researchers have become interested in figuring out their underlying mental “structure”. Do children’s moral rules operate like a loose “‘anthology”, where judgements passed on the basis of one principle have little effect on judgements on the basis of another? Or is there a deeper underpinning mental framework that gives rise to a multitude of connected moral expectations? 

A recent study in PNAS by a duo of American researchers breaks new ground on this fascinating question. It reveals that toddlers are guided by a core mental representation of what it means to be a moral person (albeit with some potentially concerning caveats). Within this moral framework, a single faux pas risks entirely sweeping an individual from a child’s good books. 
[...]
The finding indicates that children judge others from a holistic perspective of what being moral really means. In their view, a single action that is at odds with one aspect of a “good” representation implies that the individual should be expected to violate other moral principles.
[...]
the moral principles that children use do not operate in arbitrary isolation. They stem from a core mental representation of what makes someone a moral person. Whether this representation is “hardwired” or amenable to changes through development, experience, and age is an exciting question for future research to address.

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2021/12/14/once-a-meanie-always-a-meanie-toddlers-are-harsh-judges-of-moral-character/

Toddlers also give the benefit of the doubt to individuals (perhaps a bit too strongly):

The researchers saw this when they repeated their experiment, except this time the toddlers first witnessed a dog puppet mistreating a rabbit (as opposed to a fellow dog) before watching the dog share out a pair of toys. 

In this scenario, toddlers gazed longer when the dog went on to make an unequal sharing decision, suggesting that they still expected the puppet to be fair. Only when the researchers ensured that the dog engaged in three sequential acts of bullying towards the rabbit did the children’s gaze patterns suggest that they no longer expected it to act fairly in the next social interaction.

Other studies observed tribalism is evident in other children:

While this outcome is not entirely surprising (other studies have documented children expecting others to give their in-group members special treatment)

We examined whether one mechanism contributing to ingroup favoritism might be an abstract and early-emerging sociomoral expectation of ingroup support. In violation-of-expectation experiments, 17-mo-old infants first watched third-party interactions among unfamiliar adults identified (using novel labels) as belonging to the same group, to different groups, or to unspecified groups. Next, one adult needed help, and another adult either did or did not provide it. Infants expected help to be provided when the two adults belonged to the same group, but held no expectation when the adults belonged to different groups or to unspecified groups. Infants thus already possess an abstract expectation of ingroup support, and this finding sheds light on one of the mechanisms underlying ingroup favoritism in human interactions.

Ingroup favoritism (IGF) refers to the tendency to favor ingroup individuals over outgroup individuals in evaluations and actions. For example, adults and children age 4 y and older have been shown to generally prefer ingroup members, to evaluate ingroup members more positively, to favor ingroup members when allocating resources, and to be more willing to help ingroup members in need of assistance (1⇓⇓⇓⇓–6). Remarkably, similar results have been obtained even when adults and children are experimentally assigned to minimal groups (7⇓⇓⇓⇓–12). Minimal groups typically have three features: the basis for categorization into the groups is salient but random or arbitrary, no meaningful information is provided about the groups, and social interactions within and between the groups are limited to avoid generating meaningful information about the groups (8, 13). The well-established finding that mere categorization into a minimal group is sufficient to elicit some degree of IGF has attracted considerable attention from researchers across the social sciences.

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/31/8199

Or maybe the infants assume there is a moral reason the individual has been excluded from the group?

Also, I can't help but wonder if a "minimal group" could be understood as a team or 'task force/labor unit' rather than a tribe, depending on the experiment. Obviously it makes more sense to work more closely with your delegated squad/team when working to solve a problem, but in that context "favoritism" is merely direct collaboration and is not the same thing as a tribalistic lack of empathy for non-group members.

A brief look at children's cartoons over the past 100 years shows that the communities in those cartoons are made up of humans and sentient non-humans of all species (often including sentient plants, rocks, furniture, etc.!), so whatever group distinction they are picking up in the "minimal group" scenarios doesn't necessarily seem to be tribalism per se.