Preschool children weigh accuracy against partisanship when seeking information.

The current work asked how preschool-age children (N = 200) weigh accuracy against partisanship when seeking information. When choosing between a story that favored the ingroup but came from an unreliable source and a story that favored the outgroup but came from a reliable source, children were split between the two; although they tracked both reliability and bias, they were conflicted about which one to prioritize. Furthermore, children changed their opinions of the groups after hearing the story they had chosen; children who heard an unreliable ingroup-favoring story ended up more biased against the outgroup even while recognizing that the story's author was not a trustworthy source of information. Implications for the study of susceptibility to misinformation are discussed.