When not helping is nice: Children's changing evaluations of helping during COVID-19.

A key aspect of children's moral and social understanding involves recognizing the value of helpful behaviors. COVID-19 has complicated this process; behaviors generally considered praiseworthy were considered problematic during the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study examined whether 6- to 12-year-olds (N = 228; residing in the United States) adapt their evaluations of helpful behavior in response to shifting norms. Specifically, we presented children with scenarios featuring helpful and unhelpful actions that involved physical interaction (e.g., hugging) or nonphysical interaction (e.g., recruiting a teacher); although all children were tested during the COVID-19 pandemic, stories portrayed individuals either before or during COVID-19. While children generally judged helpfulness positively and unhelpfulness negatively, children exhibited a selective shift in their judgments for COVID-19 scenarios: children considered helpfulness negatively and unhelpfulness positively if helping required physical interaction. These findings demonstrate that children flexibly tune their social evaluations of helping to align with evolving norms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Children use common knowledge to solve coordination problems.

Recent work suggests that common knowledge is an important cognitive mechanism for coordinating prosocial behavior, in part because it reduces uncertainty about others' cooperative behavior. However, it remains unclear whether children also rely on common knowledge to solve coordination problems. Here we examined whether 6- to 9-year-old children (N = 133) from the United States were more likely to attempt to coordinate when they had common knowledge about a joint payoff. Participants saw 3 vignettes that modeled the structure of a 2-player coordination problem and were provided with common knowledge, secondary knowledge, or private knowledge about the mutually beneficial, but risky, joint payoff. By 6 years of age, participants were more likely to attempt to coordinate when they had common knowledge than secondary knowledge, and secondary knowledge than private knowledge. Participants were also most likely to expect the other player to coordinate, and were most certain in their predictions, when there was common knowledge. Results indicate that, by middle childhood, children are able to solve coordination problems by relying on common knowledge, in part because it likely increases their certainty in others' cooperative behavior. Overall, findings suggest that common knowledge is an important cognitive mechanism for coordinating behavior and that it does so by reducing uncertainty about others' cooperative behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Children's judgments of interventions against norm violations: COVID-19 as a naturalistic case study.

The coronavirus pandemic has had a significant influence on social interactions, introducing novel social norms such as mask-wearing and social distancing to protect people's health. Because these norms and associated practices are completely novel, it is unknown how children assess what kinds of interventions are appropriate under what circumstances and what principles they draw on in their decisions. We investigated children's reasoning about interventions against individuals who failed to adhere to COVID-19 norms. In this pre-registered study (N = 128), 4- to 7-year-olds heard stories about a norm violator, that is, a person who refuses to wear a mask in class (COVID condition) or wear indoor shoes in class when his or her shoes are muddy (Muddy Shoes condition). Children evaluated four different interventions-giving a mask/indoor shoes (Giving), preventing the person from entering (Exclusion), throwing a paper ball at the person (Throwing), and not intervening (Doing Nothing)-in terms of their rightness, niceness, and effectiveness. We found that across measures children evaluated Giving most positively, whereas they viewed Throwing most negatively. Doing Nothing and Exclusion received mixed evaluations across measures, revealing nuanced judgments of these interventions in children. In most measures, there was no difference between the COVID and Muddy Shoes conditions, suggesting that children's evaluations are not specific to the novel COVID-19 context. Together, our results show that children dynamically evaluate each intervention, taking multiple factors into account. The current study has implications for the development of interventions against norm violations.

The Dark Triad and framing effects predict selfish behavior in a one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma.

What causes us to display selfish behaviors? We explored the extent to which Dark Triad traits (sub-clinical psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism) support a selfish behavioral strategy. We related performance on a hypothetical Prisoner's Dilemma (an economic game that simulates a two-person social dilemma) to participants' (N = 1400) Dark Triad scores. Because contextual factors also impact selfish behaviors, we tested how framing (gain vs. loss; and social vs. nonsocial) shaped performance in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Participants with high Dark Triad scores were more likely to behave selfishly in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Participants were also most likely to betray their partner in loss-framed and non-socially framed contexts. These effects did not interact with Dark Triad scores. Our data are consistent with the view that seemingly negative personality traits (like those associated with the Dark Triad traits) that persist in the population may serve as evolutionarily adaptive behavioral strategies.

Effects of Tearing on the Perception of Facial Expressions of Emotion.

What is the function of emotional tearing? Previous work has found a tear effect, which resolves ambiguity in neutral expressions and increases perceptions of sadness in sad expressions. Tearing, however, is associated with a variety of emotional states, and it remains unclear how the tear effect generalizes to other emotion expressions. Here we expand upon previous works by examining ratings of video clips depicting posed facial expressions presented with and without tears. We replicate Provine et al.'s (2009) findings that tearing increases perceptions of sadness in sad expressions. Furthermore, we find that tearing has specific effects on ratings of emotion (happiness, sadness, anger, and fear) and ratings of intensity and valence in neutral, positive, and negative expressions. These results suggest that tearing may serve a specific and independent communicative function, interacting with those of various expressions.