Yarrow Dunham

Who they are

Dunham is a developmental psychologist whose 2011 experiments on children are cited in the article on in-group bias. This page is limited to that published work; a fuller biography has not been added.

Key papers

• Dunham, Baron and Carey (2011), Consequences of minimal group affiliations in children, Child Development 82(3), 793-811. Three experiments (total N = 140) tested whether five-year-olds' membership in randomly assigned groups would be enough to produce intergroup bias. Without information about group status or competition, children showed in-group preferences on explicit and implicit attitude measures, resource allocation, behavioural attribution and expectations of reciprocity. The preferences persisted when groups were not labelled with a noun. Children also preferentially encoded positive information about in-group members, which distorted the information they received.

Key ideas

The paper applies the minimal group design to young children and discusses the results in terms of the developmental origins of intergroup bias.

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