Crossing religious boundaries: Individual and contextual determinants of who can violate religious norms.

In pluralistic societies, encounters with individuals, contexts, and norms of other religions can prompt conflict. We test a novel framework for explaining how individuals apply religious norms across individuals and contexts. In Studies 1 and 2, adolescents and adults in India and the United States judged events in which religious norms were violated by protagonists of different religions in different religious contexts. Participants often judged that norm violations were wrong even when the norm religion matched only the protagonist or context religion. Study 3 presented dilemmas that pitted religious norms against non-religious concerns. Participants favored following the religious norm yet accepted the protagonist's right to violate it. In each adult sample, more religious participants more often judged that protagonists were obligated to follow the protagonist's own religious norms. These findings reveal individual and contextual determinants of judgments about religious violations with implications for peaceful coexistence in pluralistic societies.

Indian = Hindu? The Development of Nationalist Attitudes Among Hindu and Muslim Children in India.

Many political movements across the world today define citizenship in exclusionary ethnic or religious terms. This study extends research on ethnic-national associations in adults to children, adding to the relatively sparse literature on the development of national associations in children and in nonwestern contexts. Explicit and implicit religious-national associations were examined in a sample of 160 nine- to sixteen-year-olds (79 Hindu; 81 Muslim) in Gujarat, India. Results suggest that while Hindu children show a strong Indian = Hindu association by age 9, Muslim children appear to be buffered from this association. Furthermore, this association uniquely predicts variance in children's attitudes about social policy and their concept of nationality, above and beyond their age, religion, and intergroup attitudes.

Children use polysemy to structure new word meanings.

It is well-known that children rapidly learn words, following a range of heuristics. What is less well appreciated is that-because most words are polysemous and have multiple meanings (e.g., "glass" can label a material and drinking vessel)-children will often be learning a new meaning for a known word, rather than an entirely new word. Across 4 experiments we show that children flexibly adapt a well-known heuristic-the shape bias-when learning polysemous words. Consistent with previous studies, we find that children and adults preferentially extend a new object label to other objects of the same shape. But we also find that when a new word for an object ("a gup") has previously been used to label the material composing that object ("some gup"), children and adults override the shape bias, and are more likely to extend the object label by material (Experiments 1 and 3). Further, we find that, just as an older meaning of a polysemous word constrains interpretations of a new word meaning, encountering a new word meaning leads learners to update their interpretations of an older meaning (Experiment 2). Finally, we find that these effects only arise when learners can perceive that a word's meanings are related, not when they are arbitrarily paired (Experiment 4). Together, these findings show that children can exploit cues from polysemy to infer how new word meanings should be extended, suggesting that polysemy may facilitate word learning and invite children to construe categories in new ways. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).