The research team asked a deceptively simple question: when do humans start caring about the formidability of the groups they affiliate with, and does this motive differ between the sexes? Formidability, in the language of evolutionary psychology, refers to a group’s capacity to prevail in conflict, and across the animal kingdom it is often a function of sheer numbers. Male lions roar to advertise coalition size, chimpanzees patrol borders with numerical assessment in mind, and dolphins form super-alliances whose advantages scale with membership. Humans, too, have long been theorized to possess coalitional psychology tuned to group size, but the developmental origins of this sensitivity, and its gendered structure, had remained unresolved.

To answer the question, the investigators deployed the same kind of minimal, abstract group stimuli across three distinct life stages, a methodological choice that allowed direct comparison from infancy to adulthood. Preverbal infants watched animated scenes featuring novel agents belonging to groups of different sizes. Preschool children, aged roughly three to six, were familiarized with similar abstract groups and then asked which members they liked or preferred. Adults completed comparable preference measures alongside a battery of political attitude scales. Because the stimuli were stripped of any real-world social markers such as ethnicity, language or gender, any preferences that emerged could be attributed to group size itself rather than to learned cultural associations.

The results were striking in their asymmetry. Among 317 preschool children, boys reliably preferred members of the majority group over members of the minority, while girls showed no such preference, distributing their choices without regard to group size. Among 180 preverbal infants, by contrast, neither boys nor girls chose systematically between majority and minority members; their selections were essentially random. This developmental dissociation is critical. It suggests that the capacity to represent groups and even to infer dominance from numerical superiority is present well before language, consistent with earlier work showing that infants expect larger groups to win conflicts and expect novel agents to join majorities. Yet the motivational pull of the larger group, the desire to affiliate with it, appears only later, once children begin navigating peer relationships independently.

This timing is theoretically meaningful. Infants may understand, in an abstract sense, that bigger groups are more powerful, but they do not yet act on that understanding as a social preference. Preschoolers, by contrast, are entering a world of alliances, friendships and rough-and-tumble play in which coalitional dynamics become personally consequential. Prior research has documented that boys, more than girls, gravitate toward group-based interaction and play fighting, and that coalitional play may serve as a rehearsal ground for intergroup aggression. The new findings suggest that somewhere in the transition from infancy to preschool, a preference for size and strength crystallizes in boys in a way it does not in girls, transforming a cold cognitive representation of power into a hot motivational orientation.

The adult data extend the story into the political realm with remarkable scale. Across 3,467 adults, men liked majority groups more than women did, replicating the childhood pattern. More provocatively, the strength of these coalitional preferences correlated with political ideology. Participants who showed stronger affinity for large, formidable groups also expressed greater support for sustaining intergroup hierarchies, including harsher attitudes toward ethnic minorities, more militaristic foreign policy stances, and greater opposition to social welfare programs. The correlation was robust across analytical approaches, and the researchers used Bayesian methods to quantify the evidence, with data and analysis files made publicly available through the Open Science Framework.

These adult findings dovetail with decades of work on social dominance orientation, a construct introduced by Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto to capture individual differences in the preference for group-based hierarchy. One of the most replicated findings in political psychology is that men score higher than women on this orientation, a pattern documented across cultures and even linked to common genetic underpinnings in twin studies. What the new research adds is a developmental origin story: the gender gap in hierarchy preferences may not be manufactured by adult socialization alone but may trace back to the coalitional motives that emerge when boys first begin forming peer groups. In this view, political ideology is not merely a set of learned positions but, in part, an expression of ancient motivational systems that come online in early childhood.

The authors are careful about what the data do and do not show. The study demonstrates that gendered preferences for group formidability appear early and predict ideology, but it cannot fully disentangle the contributions of biology and socialization. Boys and girls are treated differently from birth, steered toward different toys, activities and social scripts, and any of these channels could shape the observed pattern. Twin and family studies suggesting heritable components to social dominance orientation complicate a purely environmental account, but the present findings alone cannot adjudicate between an evolved predisposition, a socially constructed one, or, most plausibly, an interplay of both. What the study does establish is a timeline: the motive is absent in preverbal infancy and present in preschool, narrowing the developmental window in which the relevant processes must operate.

The implications reach beyond the laboratory. If preferences for formidable majorities take root in the preschool years, interventions aimed at reducing prejudice and hierarchy-endorsing ideology might need to begin far earlier than is typical. Educational programs targeting intergroup attitudes often start in middle childhood or adolescence, precisely because that is when explicit prejudice becomes measurable. The new findings hint that the motivational scaffolding for such attitudes is already in place years earlier, at least for boys, and that the playground is where the first hierarchy-building decisions are made. They also resonate with research on the male warrior hypothesis, which proposes that men’s greater investment in intergroup conflict reflects an evolutionary history in which male coalitions were the primary instruments of warfare.

For a field increasingly interested in the deep roots of political behavior, the study offers a compelling synthesis. The same abstract preference for joining the bigger, stronger side, visible in three-year-old boys choosing between cartoon groups, reappears in adult men as a measurable component of their ideological profiles, predicting attitudes on ethnic persecution, militarism and welfare. The continuity across such vastly different contexts, from a nursery task to a national political survey, is what makes the finding viral in its implications. It suggests that the psychology of group dominance is not a late-blooming ideological acquisition but an early-emerging motivational system, gendered from its inception, that quietly shapes how individuals relate to power, coalitions and the distribution of resources long before they can articulate what politics even means. As the authors conclude, gendered motives for intergroup formidability appear rooted in the earliest years of childhood, once children begin navigating peer relationships on their own, and they may echo through a lifetime of social and political choices.

Subject of Research: Developmental and political psychology of gendered preferences for group formidability across the lifespan

Article Title: Gendered motives for group formidability among children and adults

Article References: Fonn, E. K., Zahl, J. H., Kristensen, B. D., & Thomsen, L. (2026). Gendered motives for group formidability among children and adults. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02606-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02606-1

Keywords: social dominance orientation, group formidability, child development, political ideology, intergroup relations, coalitional psychology, preschoolers, gender differences, social hierarchy, Nature Human Behaviour, evolutionary psychology, prejudice