The aim of the study was to examine how the manipulation of information about hypothetical presidential candidates infl uenced youth’ attitudes towards them. The experiment was conducted on 929 subjects (454 women and 475 men), who were either pupils in their fi nal year of secondary school or university students, aged 18–25. The amount of information about politicians was manipulated (politicians’ gender, political affi liation, moral and competence traits (positive or negative), political programme characteristics). The results showed that (1) the own-group favoritism effect was observed only among female participants, (2) female presidential candidate was evaluated better than male presidential candidate in conditions of positive information, yet, when negative information about candidates was provided, female presidential candidate was evaluated worse than male presidential candidate.