Children think differently from adults when reasoning about resources acquired from parents.

Although sharing is often considered a virtuous behavior, individuals rarely share all their extra resources with those less fortunate. The current research investigated conditions under which children believe that someone who has more resources deserves to keep them rather than address an inequality. Specifically, we contrasted resources acquired via merit, windfall, and parental allocations. Across two studies, we showed 5- and 6-year-old children (n = 59), 8- and 9-year-old children (n = 120), and adults (n = 163) three scenarios in which one person acquired more resources than the other due to luck, due to merit, or because that person's parents gave him or her more, and we asked whether that person should share these resources or keep all of them. Results suggested that adults differentiated both the family resource and the merit conditions from the windfall allocation, believing that an agent deserves to keep the extra resources more when they are acquired through one's family or due to merit. However, children did not differentiate family resources from windfall, although they were more likely to believe that individuals deserve to keep their extra resources when they were acquired through merit. The type of the resource (i.e., money vs. balls) did not affect participants' sharing decisions. Overall, these findings suggest that over development the resources acquired from one's family come to be seen as more deserved than windfall resources.

The development and predictors of a preference for strivers over naturals in the United States and China.

Across three pre-registered studies (n = 221 4-9-year olds, 51% female; 218 parents, 80% female; working- and middle-class backgrounds; data collected during 2019-2021) conducted in the United States (Studies 1-2; 74% White) and China (Study 3; 100% Asian), we document the emergence of a preference for "strivers." Beginning at age 7, strivers (who work really hard) were favored over naturals (who are really smart) in both cultures (R2 ranging .03-.11). We explored several lay beliefs surrounding this preference. Beliefs about outcomes and the controllability of effort predicted the striver preference: Children who expected strivers to be more successful than naturals and believed effort was more controllable than talent preferred strivers more. Implications of the striver preference in education and beyond are discussed.

Expectations of intergroup empathy bias emerge by early childhood.

Across two preregistered studies with children (3-12-year-olds; N = 356) and adults (N = 262) from the United States, we find robust expectations for intergroup empathic biases. Participants predicted that people would feel better about ingroup fortunes than outgroup fortunes and worse about ingroup misfortunes than outgroup misfortunes. Expectations of empathic bias were stronger when there was animosity and weaker when there was fondness between groups. The largest developmental differences emerged in participants' expectations about how others feel about outgroup misfortunes, particularly when there was intergroup animosity. Whereas young children (3-5-year-olds) generally expected people to feel empathy for the outgroup (regardless of the relationship between the groups), older children (9-12-year-olds) and adults expected Schadenfreude (feeling good when an outgroup experiences a misfortune) when the groups disliked one another. Overall, expectations of empathic biases emerge early but may be weaker when there are positive intergroup relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Parent and self-socialization of gender intergroup attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors among ethnically and geographically diverse young children.

Previous work has shown the robust nature of gender bias in both children and adults. However, much less attention has been paid toward understanding what factors shape these biases. The current preregistered study used parent surveys and child interviews to test whether parents' conversations with their children about and modeling of gender intergroup relations and/or children's self-guided interests about gender (self-socialization) contribute to the formation of gender attitudes, status perceptions, and gender intergroup behaviors among young 4- to 6-year-old children. Our participant sample also allowed us to explore variation by child gender, ethnicity (Asian-, Black-, Latiné-, and White-American), and U.S. geographical region (Northeast, Pacific Northwest, West, Southeast, and Hawaii). Data suggest that children whose parents reported they were especially active in seeking information about gender tended to allocate more resources to same-gender versus other-gender children and expressed less positive evaluations of other-gender children in comparison to children who were less active. By contrast, we found that parents' conversations with their children about gender intergroup relations and about gender-play stereotypes showed few connections with children's gender attitudes. In terms of demographic differences, boys raised in households with more unequal versus equal division of labor perceived that men had higher status than women, but few differences by ethnicity or geographic region emerged. In sum, our study suggests that both self- and parent socialization processes are at play in shaping early gender attitudes, status perceptions, and gender intergroup behavior, although self-socialization seemed to play a larger role. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Same people, different group: Social structures are a central component of group concepts.

We examine whether people conceptualize organized groups as having at least two parts: In addition to members (e.g., Alice), they also have social structures (i.e., roles and relations). If groups have members and social structures, then numerically distinct groups can have the same members if they differ in their structures. In Studies 1-4, participants numerically distinguished groups that had the same members when they had different structures. Participants numerically distinguished even when groups had the same function-the same people playing chess together Monday and Tuesday can be numerically distinct groups. In Study 4, we compare clubs to tables, and find that participants numerically distinguish tables by their structures too (i.e., the configuration of their parts) even when they have the same parts (which can be disassembled and then reassembled with ease). In Study 5, we find that participants rate groups as existing in space and time like concrete objects, suggesting that participants represent groups as at least partially concrete, such that groups have at least two parts (their structures and their members). Finally, in Study 6, we show that people will judge the same person as exemplary with respect to one group but condemnable with respect to another-even when those groups have the same members.

Identifying social partners through indirect prosociality: A computational account.

The ability to identify people who are prosocial, supportive, and mindful of others is critical for choosing social partners. While past work has emphasized the information value of direct social interactions (such as watching someone help or hinder others), social tendencies can also be inferred from indirect evidence, such as how an agent considers others when making personal choices. Here we present a computational model of this capacity, grounded in a Bayesian framework for action understanding. Across four experiments we show that this model captures how people infer social preferences based on how agents act when their choices indirectly impact others (Experiments 1a, 1b, & 1c), and how people infer what an agent knows about others from knowledge of that agent's social preferences (Experiment 2). Critically, people's patterns of inferences could not be explained by simpler alternatives. These findings illuminate how people can discern potential social partners from indirect evidence of their prosociality, thus deepening our understanding of partner detection, and social cognition more broadly.

Beyond our tribe: Developing a normative sense of group-transcendent fairness.

Human beings naturally prefer and support ingroup members more than outgroup members, but to what extent do we morally value equal treatment to ingroups and outgroups? Across four preregistered studies, we examined the development of "group-transcendent fairness," that is, the moral endorsement of allocating resources equally to ingroup members and outgroup members. We found that when allocating common resources to ingroup and outgroup members, American adults (N = 549) thought it was morally right to allocate equally instead of giving more to their family, political, or minimal ingroup members, across high and low stakes (Study 1). This normative sense of group-transcendent fairness develops gradually: 4- to 6-year-olds tended to endorse ingroup favoritism, whereas by age 8 or 9 children endorsed intergroup fairness (Studies 2-3, N = 214). Adults from China (N = 200)-a culture that values ingroup loyalty-also endorsed intergroup fairness as morally right, suggesting this moral value is not specific to western societies where egalitarianism is emphasized (Study 4). In contrast to the normative endorsement of intergroup fairness, participants in all studies did not predict most people to be fair across contexts, suggesting group-transcendent fairness was perceived more as a prescriptive than a descriptive norm (Studies 1-4). Together, our studies reveal the robust presence of group-transcendent fairness, which is valued across group contexts and cultures, develops later than ingroup support, and is prescriptive but not descriptive by nature. The findings help illuminate the nature and development of one group-transcendent moral value that helps promote intergroup relations and societal progress. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

A developmental investigation of group concepts in the context of social hierarchy: Can the powerful impose group membership?

Group membership is not always voluntary and can be imposed within a social context; moreover, those with power disproportionately shape group membership. We asked if children and adults view group membership as imposed by the powerful. We undertook four studies (465 children ages 4-9, 150 adults): Studies 1-2 used novel minimal groups; Study 3 used 'cool' and 'uncool'; Study 4 used novel ethnic groups. In the first three studies, children saw groups varying in power asserting that a non-categorized individual ought to belong to one of the operating groups in the context. Adults indicated that the declarations of the high-power group (and only the high-power group) made the individual a member of the declared group. Young children rejected that group membership could be imposed. In Study 4, children of all ages reasoned that the high-power group could decide membership for a consenting individual and impose clothing restrictions on a non-consenting individual; unlike adults, children of all ages did not reason the high-power group could impose group membership more frequently than chance. Taken together, adult participants consistently reasoned that group membership was imposed and disproportionately by those with power but children, more often than adults, reasoned that group membership was voluntary.

Subjectivity and social constitution: Contrasting conceptions of institutions, artifacts, and animals.

We systematically compared beliefs about animal (e.g., lion), artifactual (e.g., hammer), and institutional (e.g., police officer) categories, aiming to identify whether people draw different inferences about which categories are subjective and which are socially constituted. We conducted two studies with 270 American children, ages 4 through 10: 140 girls, 129 boys, one not reported; 59% White, 3% Black, 10% Asian, one Native American, 17% multiracial or another race, 11% unreported. We also conducted two studies with 360 American adults recruited from Amazon mechanical Turk. In all four studies we found that children and adults judged institutional categories as more socially constituted than artifactual categories (in all studies) but as less subjective (in three of four studies). Whereas younger and older children's beliefs about subjectivity were similar, younger and older children expressed different beliefs about social constitution. Young children judged none of the category domains as socially constituted; older children differentiated between the three domains. These results support the conceptual independence of subjectivity and social constitution and suggest that concepts of institutions and artifacts differ. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

How do explicit and implicit evaluations shift? A preregistered meta-analysis of the effects of co-occurrence and relational information.

Based on 660 effect sizes obtained from 23,255 adult participants across 51 reports of experimental studies, this meta-analysis investigates whether and when explicit (self-reported) and implicit (indirectly revealed) evaluations reflect relational information (how stimuli are related to each other) over and above co-occurrence information (the fact that stimuli have been paired with each other). Using a mixed-effects metaregression, relational information was found to dominate over contradictory co-occurrence information in shifting both explicit (mean Hedges' g = 0.97, 95% CI [0.89, 1.05], 95% PI [0.24, 1.70]) and implicit evaluations (g = 0.27, 95% CI [0.19, 0.35], 95% PI [-0.46, 1.00]). However, considerable heterogeneity in relational effects on implicit evaluation made moderator analyses necessary. Implicit evaluations were particularly sensitive to relational information (a) in between-participant (rather than within-participant) designs; when (b) co-occurrence information was held constant (rather than manipulated); (c) targets were novel (rather than known); implicit evaluations were measured (d) first (rather than last) and (e) using an affect misattribution procedure (rather than an Implicit Association Test or evaluative priming task); and (f) relational and co-occurrence information were presented in temporal proximity (rather than far apart in time). Overall, the present findings suggest that both implicit and explicit evaluations emerge from a combination of co-occurrence information and relational information, with relational information usually playing the dominant role. Critically, variability in these effects highlights a need to refocus attention from existence proof demonstrations toward theoretical and empirical work on the determinants and boundary conditions of the influences of co-occurrence and relational information on explicit and implicit evaluations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Children's memory for gender-neutral pronouns.

Are there disparities in children's memory for gender-neutral pronouns compared with gendered pronouns? We explored this question in two preregistered studies with 4- to 10-year-old children (N = 168; 79 boys, 89 girls, 0 gender-diverse). Participants were presented with a memory task. An experimenter read an illustrated story about a target character. Participants were asked to verbally repeat the story to measure spontaneous pronoun use and then to explicitly recall the characters' pronouns. In Study 1 the story characters had typically feminine or typically masculine appearances (determined by independent raters), whereas in Study 2 the characters had gender-neutral appearances. In both studies, targets were referred to with gendered or gender-neutral pronouns. In both studies, children more accurately recalled gendered pronouns than gender-neutral pronouns. However, on most tasks, children only used "they" if a character had gender-neutral pronouns, and almost never used "they" if a character had gendered pronouns. We also found some evidence suggesting that older children more accurately recall gender-neutral pronouns compared with younger children.

Problems and Mysteries of the Many Languages of Thought.

"What is the structure of thought?" is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that underwrite various LoT-based systems and how these variations can help researchers taxonomize cognitive systems.

The developmental trajectories of racial and gender intergroup bias in 5- to 10-year-old children: The impact of general psychological tendencies, contextual factors, and individual propensities.

Racism and intergroup discrimination are pervasive problems in human societies. Whereas several studies have shown that children show bias in the context of many kinds of groups, much less is known about how and when general psychological tendencies and contextual factors contribute to the manifestation of intergroup bias across development, and whether individual differences play a role. In the present study, we pursue these questions by investigating and comparing the developmental trajectories of intergroup bias in 5- to 10-year-old (mostly) White children (n = 100). We assessed children's liking and preferences towards 4 racial groups (White, East Asian, Black, and Middle Eastern) and towards 2 gender groups (male and female) in a within-subject design. We found that the young children in our sample showed a significant racial and gender ingroup bias, speaking to an early and strong manifestation of intergroup bias on the basic ingroup-outgroup distinction. This bias decreased with age. At the same time, we found considerable differences between the different types of outgroups from early on. Furthermore, there were remarkable differences between the developmental trajectories of gender and racial intergroup bias, highlighting the role of both social and contextual influences. Finally, our results did not reveal consistent evidence for the influence of individual differences on children's intergroup bias.

Which group matters more: The relative strength of minimal vs. gender and race group memberships in children's intergroup thinking.

Experimentally created "minimal" social groups are frequently used as a means to investigate core components of intergroup cognition in children and adults. Yet, it is unclear how the effects of such arbitrary group memberships compare to those of salient real-world group memberships (gender and race) when they are directly pitted against each other in the same studies. Across three studies, we investigate these comparisons in 4-7-year-olds. Study 1 (N = 48) establishes the minimal group paradigm, finding that children develop ingroup preferences as well as other forms of group-based reasoning (e.g., moral obligations) following random assignment to a minimal group. Study 2 (N = 96) and Study 3 (N = 48) directly compare this minimal group to a real-world social group (gender or race) in a cross-categorization paradigm, in which targets are participants' ingroups in terms of the minimal group and outgroups in terms of a real-world social group, or vice versa. The relative strength of the minimal group varies, but in general it either has a similar effect or a stronger effect as compared to race and in some cases even gender. Our results support the contention that an abstract tendency to divide the world into "us" and "them" is a central force in early intergroup cognition.

What can the implicit social cognition literature teach us about implicit social cognition?

We highlight several sets of findings from the past decade elucidating the relationship between implicit social cognition and real-world inequality: Studies focusing on practical ramifications of implicit social cognition in applied contexts, the relationship between implicit social cognition and consequential real-world outcomes at the level of individuals and geographic units, and convergence between individual-level and corpus-based measures of implicit bias.

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.

Chimpanzees consider freedom of choice in their evaluation of social action.

Judgements of wrongdoing in humans often hinge upon an assessment of whether a perpetrator acted out of free choice: whether they had more than one option. The classic inhibitors of free choice are constraint (e.g. having your hands tied together) and ignorance (e.g. being unaware that an alternative exists). Here, across two studies, we investigate whether chimpanzees consider these factors in their evaluation of social action. Chimpanzees interacted with a human experimenter who handed them a non-preferred item of food, either because they were physically constrained from accessing the preferred item (Experiment 1) or because they were ignorant of the availability of the preferred item (Experiment 2). We found that chimpanzees were more likely to accept the non-preferred food and showed fewer negative emotional responses when the experimenter was physically constrained compared with when they had free choice. We did not, however, find an effect of ignorance on chimpanzee's evaluation. Freedom of choice factors into chimpanzees' evaluation of how they are treated, but it is unclear whether mental state reasoning is involved in this assessment.

Emerging complexity in children's conceptualization of the wealthy and the poor.

Past work suggests that children have an overly rosy view of rich people that stays consistent across childhood. However, adults do not show explicit pro-rich biases and even hold negative stereotypes against the rich (e.g., thinking that rich people are cold and greedy). When does this developmental shift occur, and when do children develop more complex and differentiated understandings of the wealthy and the poor? The current work documents the developmental trajectory of 4-12-yr-old primarily American middle-class children's conceptualizations of the wealthy and the poor (total N = 164). We find: (1) age-related decreases in pro-rich preferences and stereotypes relative to the poor; (2) domain-sensitive stereotypes across prosociality, talent, and effort; (3) resource-specific behavioral expectations such that with age children increasingly expect the wealthy to contribute more material resources but not more time than the poor; (4) an increasing recognition of the unfairness of the wealth gap between the wealthy and the poor; and (5) a developing understanding of the link between wealth and power. In sum, this work illuminates the emergence of more complex understandings of wealth, poverty, and inequality.

Testing the limits of structural thinking about gender.

When seeking to explain social regularities (such as gender differences in the labor market) people often rely on internal features of the targets, frequently neglecting structural and systemic factors external to the targets. For example, people might think women leave the job market after childbirth because they are less competent or are better suited for child-rearing than men, thereby eliding socio-cultural and economic factors that disadvantage women. Across two studies (total N = 192) we probe 4- and 5-year-olds and 7- and 8-year-olds' internal versus structural reasoning about gender. We explore the evaluative and behavioral implications of this reasoning process with both novel gendered behaviors that were experimentally created and familiar gendered behaviors that exist outside of a lab context. We show that children generate more structural explanations, evaluate the structural explanation more positively, expect behaviors to be more mutable, and evaluate gender non-conforming behaviors more positively when structural cues are provided. However, we also show that such information may be of limited effectiveness at reducing pre-existing group-based discriminatory behaviors: children continue to report less willingness to affiliate with peers who display non-conforming behaviors even in the presence of structural cues. Taken together, these results provide evidence concerning children's structural reasoning about gender categories and shed new light on how such reasoning might affect social evaluations and behavioral intentions.

Beliefs about social norms and racial inequalities predict variation in the early development of racial bias.

Racism remains a pervasive force around the world with widespread and well documented harmful consequences for members of marginalized racial groups. The psychological biases that maintain structural and interpersonal racism begin to emerge in early childhood, but with considerable individual variation-some children develop more racial bias than others. The present study (N = 116; 4-year-old children) provides novel insights into the developmental mechanisms underlying the emergence of racial bias by longitudinally documenting how two psychological processes-normative beliefs about interracial friendships and explanatory beliefs about racial inequalities-developmentally predict the emergence of pro-White/anti-Black racial bias during early childhood. In a 6-month, three-wave, longitudinal study, we found that 4-year-old children's beliefs that their parents and peers do not value interracial friendships predicted increased racial bias in and across time and that children's endorsement of essentialist over extrinsic explanations for racial inequalities predicted the developmental trajectory of racial bias over time. These findings suggest that children's foundational beliefs about the social world developmentally predict the emergence of racial bias in early childhood and speak to the importance of early and persistent intervention efforts targeting children's normative beliefs about interracial friendships and explanatory beliefs about racial inequalities.