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Immigration is among the most pressing issues of our time. Important questions concern the psychological mechanisms that contribute to attitudes about immigration. Whereas much is known about adults' immigration attitudes, the developmental antecedents of these attitudes are not well understood. Across three studies (N = 616), we examined US children's attitudes toward migrants by introducing them to two novel groups of people: one native to an island and the other migrants to the island. The migrants varied by (1) Migrant Status: migrants came from a resource-poor island (fleers) or a resource-rich island (pursuers); and (2) Acculturation Style: migrants assimilated to the native culture (assimilated) or retained their original cultural identity (separated). We studied a range of children's immigration attitudes: children's preferences, resource allocations, and perceptions of solidarity between groups (Experiment 1), children's conferral of voting power (Experiment 2a) and political representation (Experiment 2b), and children's beliefs about political representation when an equal government was not possible (Experiment 3). Overall, children showed a bias toward natives, but the degree of their bias depended on the type of migrant they were evaluating. Children generally favored Pursuers over Fleers, and Assimilated migrants over Separated migrants. In some cases, the intersection of these factors mattered: children expressed a specific preference for Separated Pursuers and a specific penalization of Separated Fleers. These studies reveal the early developmental roots of immigration attitudes, particularly as they relate to political power and the intersecting forces of migrant status and acculturation., (© 2024 The Author(s). Developmental Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

A majority of the world's population is multilingual, yet children's language-based preferences have largely been studied in Western monolingual contexts. The present research investigated language-based preferences in 4- to 8-year-old children living in Hyderabad, India, a multilingual region with languages such as Telugu (official language of the state, and the native language of many children in the state) and English (medium of instruction in some schools). We presented to children novel objects and probed their selective preference to learn from different speakers (Telugu, British-accented English, or Indian-accented English). In addition, the current study assessed the flexibility of children's preferences by manipulating the learning goal (i.e., performance goal vs. enjoyment goal) and learning content (i.e., Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics [STEM] objects vs. cultural objects). Children showed a preference for both English speakers over Telugu speakers, a tendency that increased with age. This preference was especially pronounced for performance learning goals and for STEM learning content. Furthermore, children whose native language was Telugu showed a less pronounced English bias. The results of this study provide new insights into the development of language-based biases in multilingual environments. First, they highlight dual and intersecting considerations of speaker familiarity and speaker status in guiding children's choices about from whom to learn. Second, the results suggest that children's language-based preferences in a pedagogical setting are flexible, as children integrate social cues (e.g., language-based attitudes) as well as contextual cues (e.g., the learning goal) strategically. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

We examined 3- to 10-year-old U.S. children's naïve biological beliefs about spoken language, probing developing beliefs about where language is located in the body. Experiment 1 (N = 128) introduced children to two aliens, each having eight parts: internal organs (brain and lungs), face parts (mouth and ears), limbs (arms and legs), and accessories (bag and hat). Participants were assigned to the Language condition (in which the aliens spoke two different languages) or the control Sports condition (in which the aliens played two different sports). We assessed children's reasoning about which parts were necessary to speak a language (or play a sport) by asking children to (a) create a new alien with the ability to speak a language (or play a sport) and (b) remove parts of an alien while preserving its ability to speak a language (or play a sport). In the Language condition, with age, children attributed language-speaking abilities to internal organs and face parts. In Experiment 2 (N = 32), a simplified language task revealed that 3- and 4-year-old children demonstrated a weaker, albeit present, biological belief about language. In Experiment 3 (N = 96), children decided at what point an alien would lose its ability to speak the language as the experimenter added or removed parts. Children attributed language-speaking abilities to specific internal organs and face parts (brain and mouth). We demonstrate that children believe that language is contained to specific parts of the body and that this "metabiological" reasoning increases with age., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Across four studies (total N = 431), we examined 5- to 10-year-old children's choices to censor depictions of harm. In all studies, children learned about (fictional) movies that depicted harmful behaviors and decided whether specific audiences should be allowed to watch those movies. In Study 1, children often censored depictions of harms and did so similarly when considering both themselves and another hypothetical child as the viewer. At the same time, children did not censor indiscriminately: Children censored depictions of intentional harms more than accidental harms and, in Study 2, children (and adults; N = 101) censored harms (especially intentional ones) more from younger versus older audiences. In Studies 3 and 4, we more directly tested children's motivations for censoring harms, examining dual potential motivations of 1) preventing viewers from feeling sad; and 2) preventing viewers from being inspired to engage in harmful behaviors. We found that children who were motivated to avoid inspiring harmful behaviors were especially likely to censor depictions of harmful intentions. Together, our results indicate that children make sophisticated decisions regarding censorship and underscore an early emerging motivation to disrupt cascades of harmful behavior. These findings hold implications for children's thinking about the psychological and behavioral consequences of harm and for children's thinking about the potential effects of media on themselves and others., (Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

How do children learn about the structure of the social world? We tested whether children would extract patterns from an agent's social choices to make inferences about multiple groups' relative social standing. In Experiment 1, 4- to 6-year-old children (N = 36; tested in Central New York) saw an agent and three groups (Group-A, Group-B, and Group-C) and observed the agent choose between pairs of individuals from different groups. Across pairwise selections, a pattern emerged: The agent chose individuals from Group-A > Group-B > Group-C. Children tracked the agent's choices to predict that Group-A was "most-preferred" and the "leader" and that Group-C was "least-preferred" and the "helper." In Experiments 2 and 3, we examined children's reasoning about a more complex pattern involving four groups and tested a wider age range. In Experiment 2, 5- to 10-year-old children (N = 98; tested in Central New York) used the agent's pattern of pairwise choices to infer that the agent liked Group-A > Group-B > Group-C > Group-D and to make predictions about which groups were likely to be "leaders" and "helpers." In Experiment 3, we found evidence for social specificity in children's reasoning: 5- to 10-year-old children (N = 96; from 26 US States) made inferences about groups' relative social but not physical power from the agent's pattern of affiliative choices across the four groups. These findings showcase a mechanism through which children may learn about societal-level hierarchies through the patterns they observe over time in people's group-based social choices. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Children in our sample extracted patterns from an agent's positive social choices between multiple groups to reason about groups' relative social standing. Children used the pattern of an agent's positive social choices to guide their reasoning about which groups were likely to be "leaders" and "helpers" in a fictional town. The pattern that emerged in an agent's choices of friends shaped children's thinking about groups' relative social but not physical power. Children tracked social choices to reason about group-based hierarchies at the individual level (which groups an agent prefers) and societal level (which groups are privileged)., (© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

People who are in close relationships tend to do and like the same things, a phenomenon termed the "homophily principle." The present research probed for evidence of the homophily principle in 4- to 6-year-old children. Across two experiments, participants ( N = 327; 166 girls, 161 boys; located in the Midwestern United States) were asked to predict the closeness of two people based on their preferences. Participants in Experiment 1 indicated that people with a shared preference or a shared dispreference were more closely affiliated than people whose preferences diverged, suggesting inferences of homophily. Furthermore, children were not only relying on the emotional valences expressed: They expected people with a shared preference to be closer than people who expressed positive emotions about different items and expected people with a shared dispreference to be closer than people who expressed negative emotions about different items. Experiment 2 replicated and extended the main findings of Experiment 1 with more naturalistic stimuli. The present studies provide strong evidence that young children apply the homophily principle to their reasoning about social relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Negotiations are critical to interpersonal interactions, yet little is known about how the conceptual skills that support successful negotiations develop in childhood and across societies. Here, we presented 384 3-10-year-old children in the United States and India with tasks that measured children's understanding that people can value the same resources differently (Experiments 1-4) and that underlying interests motivate people's stated positions (Experiment 5). In Experiments 1 and 2, children participated in a third-person resource distribution task. Children distributed resources (candies) to two targets who valued resources differently: absolute preferences (liking A but disliking B) or relative preferences (liking both but preferring A to B). By age 5, children differentiated relative from absolute preferences. Experiments 3 and 4 presented a first-person variant of the same task. In trials involving a conflict in which both the child and the target preferred the same resource, U.S. children prioritized their own preferences, whereas Indian children prioritized the targets' preferences. In Experiment 5, all participants from the previous studies participated in an additional task in which two people wanted a single resource, an orange, but their interests differed-one wanted the pulp to make juice and one wanted the peel to make cake. With age, children increasingly proposed the value-maximizing option of splitting the peel from the pulp, rather than halving the orange. Notably, even the youngest Indian children chose the value-maximizing option. Our findings outline the development of two antecedents to successful negotiations and highlight the disparate role of self-interest across cultural contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Wealth, power, and status are distributed unevenly across social groups. A surge of recent research reveals that people being recognizing, representing, and reasoning about group-based patterns of inequity during the first years of life. We first synthesize recent research on what children learn about group-based social hierarchies as well as how this learning occurs. We then discuss how children not only learn about societal structures but become active participants in them. Studying the origins and development of children's thoughts and behavior regarding group-based social hierarchies provides valuable insight into how systems of inequity are perpetuated across generations and how intergroup biases related to wealth, power, and status may be mitigated and reshaped early in development., Competing Interests: Declaration of interests The authors declare no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2022. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

Across the globe, women and racial minorities are underrepresented in leadership. We examined the development of 5-10-year-old children's leadership cognition in India, the world's largest democracy. This cultural context offered the opportunity to study the development of attitudes about gender and to extend examinations of children's conceptions of race to include colorism (the privileging of lighter skin). In Experiment 1, children completed a novel Election Task in which they saw a fictional class with 20 students varying in gender (boys, girls) and race/skin tone (darker-skinned South Asian [Dark-SA], lighter-skinned South Asian [Light-SA], Black, White). Children predicted who would be elected as President, Treasurer, Welcomer, and Notetaker. Children most often chose Light-SA and White students as President. When choosing Presidents, younger children showed an own-gender bias, but by age 9, both boys and girls primarily chose boy Presidents. Importantly, children's choices differed for the other class positions. Next, we asked children to draw a "leader." No boys drew a girl, and girls' drawings were mixed (52% drew girls). In Experiment 2, we replicated the drawing task findings and compared children's drawings of a leader to their drawings of a helper and a scientist. Children most often drew boys and men as leaders and scientists, but not as helpers, suggesting specificity of children's pro-male bias to male-stereotyped positions. Children's conceptions of leadership reflected a male bias and an association between lighter skin and status., (© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Participants (N = 384 three- to ten-year-olds; 51% girls, 49% boys; 73% White, 18% multiracial/other, 5% Asian, and 3% Black; N = 610 adults) saw depictions of 20 individuals split into two social groups (1:19; 2:18; 5:15; or 8:12 per group) and selected which group was "in charge" (Experiment 1), "the leader" (Experiment 2), or likely to "get the stuff" (resources) in a conflict (Experiment 3). Whereas participants across ages predicted the larger group would "get the stuff," a tendency to view smaller groups as "in charge" and "the leader" strengthened with age and when the smaller group was rarer. These findings suggest the perceived relation between numerical group size and hierarchy is flexible and inform theory regarding the developmental trajectories of reasoning about power and status., (2021 The Authors. Child Development © 2021 Society for Research in Child Development.)

Understanding disease transmission is a complex problem highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. These studies test whether 3- to 6-year-old children in the United States use information about social interactions to predict disease transmission. Before and during COVID-19, children predicted illness would spread through close interactions. Older children outperformed younger children with no associations between task performance and pandemic experience. Children did not predict that being hungry or tired would similarly spread through close interactions. Participants include 196 three- to six-year-olds (53% girls, 47% boys; 68% White, 9% Black, 7% Asian, 6% Hispanic or Latinx), with medium-sized effects (d = .6, η p 2  = .3). These findings suggest that thinking about social interaction supports young children's predictions about illness, with noted limitations regarding children's real-world avoidance of disease-spreading behaviors., (© 2021 The Authors. Child Development © 2021 Society for Research in Child Development.)

We tested whether preschool-aged children (N = 280) track an agents' choices of individuals from novel social groups (i.e., social choices) to infer an agent's social preferences and the social status of the groups. Across experiments, children saw a box containing 2 groups (red and blue toy cats). In Experiment 1, children were randomly assigned to Social Selection in which items were described as "friends," or to Object Selection in which items were described as "toys." Within each selection type, the agent selected 5 items from either a numerically common group (82% of box; selections appearing random) or a numerically rare group (18% of box; selections violating random sampling). After watching these selections, children were asked who the agent would play with among 3 individuals: 1 from the selected group, 1 from the unselected group, or 1 from a novel group. Only participants who viewed Social Selection of a numerically rare group predicted that the agent would select an individual from that group in the future. These participants also said an individual from the selected group was the "leader." Subsequent experiments further probed the Social Selection findings. Children's reasoning depended on the agent actively selecting the friends (Experiment 2), and children thought a member of the rare selected group was the leader, but not the "helper" (Experiment 3). These results illustrate that children track an agent's positive social choices to reason about that agent's social preferences and to infer the status (likelihood of being a leader) of novel social groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Homophily structures human social networks: people tend to seek out or be attracted to those who share their preferences or values, and to generally expect social connections between similar people. Here, we probe the nature and extent of infants' homophilic thinking by asking whether infants can use information about other people's shared preferences in the absence of other socially relevant behaviors (e.g., their proximity or joint attention) to infer their affiliation. To do so, we present infants with scenarios in which two people either share a preference or have opposing preferences while varying (across studies) the degree to which those people engage in other socially relevant behaviors. We show that by 14 months of age, infants demonstrate clear inferences of homophily: they expect two people with a shared preference to be more likely to affiliate than two people without such similarity, even in the absence of other social behaviors that signal friendship. Although such cognition begins to emerge by 6-months, younger infants' inferences are bolstered by social behaviors that signal friendship. Thus, an abstract understanding that homophily guides third-party affiliation has its roots in the second year of life, and potentially earlier., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

An understanding of harm is central to social and cognitive development, but harm largely has been conceptualized as physical damage or injury. Less research focuses on children's judgments of harm to others' internal well-being (emotional harms). We asked 5- to 10-year-old children (N = 456, 50% girls, 50% boys; primarily tested in Central New York, with socioeconomic diversity, but limited racial/ethnic or linguistic diversity) to compare emotional and physical harms. In Experiment 1, children compared simple harms (intended and completed) and then scenarios in which the perpetrator's intention did not match the outcome (intended emotional harm, but caused physical harm, or vice-versa). Assessments of the severity of emotional (vs. physical) harm increased with age and depended on the perpetrator's intentions. In Experiment 2, children saw emotional and physical harms that were: Simple (intended and completed); Incomplete (intended, but not completed); or Accidental (not intended, but completed). Children evaluated physical and emotional harms in isolation and then compared the two. Judgments of the relative severity of emotional harm increased with age, but only when intentions and outcomes were both present. This reflected an increase with age in children's perceptions that emotional harm was hurtful, whereas perceptions of physical harm were relatively stable across development. With age, children also increasingly associated emotional harms with longer-term impacts (being remembered and reoccurring). These findings suggest reasoning about the severity, underlying intentions, and duration of emotional harm shifts with age. The results hold implications for moral development, law and psychology, and emotional-harm-related interventions including those addressing bullying. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field's investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we consider 10 topics relevant for women's career advancement in psychological science. We focus on issues that have been the subject of empirical study, discuss relevant evidence within and outside of psychological science, and draw on established psychological theory and social-science research to begin to chart a path forward. We hope that better understanding of these issues within the field will shed light on areas of existing gender gaps in the discipline and areas where positive change has happened, and spark conversation within our field about how to create lasting change to mitigate remaining gender differences in psychological science.

Social groups are a pervasive feature of human life. One factor that is often understudied in the literature on person perception and social categorization is language. Yet, someone's language (and accent) provides a tremendous amount of social information to a listener. Disciplines across the social and behavioral sciences-ranging from linguistics to anthropology to economics-have exposed the social significance of language. Less social psychological research has historically focused on language as a vehicle for social grouping. Yet, new approaches in psychology are reversing this trend. This article first reviews evidence, primarily from psycholinguistics, documenting how speech provides social information. Next it turns to developmental psychology, showing how young humans begin to see others' language as conveying social group information. It then explores how the tendency to see language as a social cue has vast implications for people's psychological processes (e.g., psychological essentialism and trust) and also for society, including education and the law.

Socially savvy individuals track what they know and what other people likely know, and they use this information to navigate the social world. We examine whether children expect people to have shared knowledge based on their social relationships (e.g., expecting friends to know each other's secrets, expecting members of the same cultural group to share cultural knowledge) and we compare children's reasoning about shared knowledge to their reasoning about common knowledge (e.g., the wrongness of moral violations). In three studies, we told 4- to 9-year-olds (N = 227) about what a child knew and asked who else knew the information: The child's friend (Studies 1-3), the child's schoolmate (Study 1), another child from the same national group (Study 2), or the child's sibling (Study 3). In all three studies, older children reliably used relationships to infer what other people knew. Moreover, with age, children increasingly considered both the type of knowledge and an individual's social relationships when reporting who knew what. The results provide support for a 'Selective Inferences' hypothesis and suggest that children's early attention to social relationships facilitates an understanding of how knowledge transfers - an otherwise challenging cognitive process., (© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Studies of children's developing social identification often focus on individual forms of identity. Yet, everyone has multiple potential identities. Here we investigated whether making children aware of their multifaceted identities-effectively seeing themselves from multiple angles-would promote their flexible thinking. In Experiment 1, 6- to 7-year-old children (N = 48) were assigned to either a Multiple-Identities condition where they were led to consider their multiple identities (e.g. friend, neighbor) or to a Physical-Traits condition where they considered their multiple physical attributes (e.g. legs, arms). Children in the Multiple-Identity condition subsequently expressed greater flexibility at problem-solving and categorization than children in the Physical-Traits condition. Experiment 2 (N = 72) replicated these findings with a new sample of 6- to 7-year-old children and demonstrated that a Multiple-Identity mindset must be self-relevant. Children who were led to think about another child's multiple identities did not express as much subsequent creative thinking as did children who thought about their own multiple identities. Experiment 3 (N = 76) showed that a Mmultiple-Identity framework may be particularly effective when the identities are presented via generic language suggesting that they are enduring traits (in this case, identities depicted as noun phrases rather than verbal phrases). These findings illustrate that something as simple as thinking about one's identity from multiple angles could serve as a tool to help reduce rigid thinking, which might increase open-mindedness in a society that is becoming increasingly diverse., (© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Can brief messages about health influence children's consumption of identical foods? Across a series of studies, we manipulated children's consumption of identical foods (fruit sauces) by pairing those foods with brief messages about each food's health status. What initially appeared to be a preference for foods described as healthy among 5- to 6-year-old children (Studies 1-2) actually reflected a preference for alternatives to foods described as unhealthy (Studies 3-5), including comparison foods that were described with negative or neutral content. Although the 2 foods on each trial were identical, children consistently ate more of the alternative to a food described as unhealthy. Similar effects were observed among 8- to 9-year-old children (Study 6). These results demonstrate that children's eating behavior is affected by messages they receive from other people, including messages about health. Further, these studies reveal basic psychological mechanisms that contribute to children's choices among foods, which could lead to effective interventions in the food domain. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Individuals and cultures share some commonalities in food preferences, yet cuisines also differ widely across social groups. Eating is a highly social phenomenon; however, little is known about the judgments children make about other people's food choices. Do children view conventional food choices as normative and consequently negatively evaluate people who make unconventional food choices? In five experiments, 5-year-old children were shown people who ate conventional and unconventional foods, including typical food items paired in unconventional ways. In Experiment 1, children preferred conventional foods and conventional food eaters. Experiment 2 suggested a link between expectations of conventionality and native/foreign status; children in the United States thought that English speakers were relatively more likely to choose conventional foods than French speakers. Yet, children in Experiments 3 and 4 judged people who ate unconventional foods as negatively as they judged people who ate canonical disgust elicitors and nonfoods, even when considering people from a foreign culture. Children in Experiment 5 were more likely to assign conventional foods to cultural ingroup members than to cultural outgroup members; nonetheless, they thought that no one was likely to eat the nonconventional items. These results demonstrate that children make normative judgments about other people's food choices and negatively evaluate people across groups who deviate from conventional eating practices., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

How does social information affect the perception of taste early in life? Does mere knowledge of other people's food preferences impact children's own experience when eating? In Experiment 1, 5- and 6-year-old children consumed more of a food described as popular with other children than a food that was described as unpopular with other children, even though the two foods were identical. In Experiment 2, children ate more of a food described as popular with children than a food described as popular with adults. Experiment 3 tested whether different perceptual experiences of otherwise identical foods contributed to the mechanisms underlying children's consumption. After sampling both endpoints of a sweet-to-sour range (applesauce with 0 mL or 5mL of lemon juice added), children were asked to taste and categorize applesauce samples with varying amounts of lemon juice added. When classifying ambiguous samples that were near the midpoint of the range (2 mL and 3 mL), children were more likely to categorize popular foods as sweet as compared to unpopular foods. Together, these findings provide evidence that social information plays a powerful role in guiding children's consumption and perception of foods. Broader links to the sociality of food selection are discussed., (© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Adults implicitly judge people from certain social backgrounds as more "American" than others. This study tests the development of children's reasoning about nationality and social categories. Children across cultures (White and Korean American children in the United States, Korean children in South Korea) judged the nationality of individuals varying in race and language. Across cultures, 5- to 6-year-old children (N = 100) categorized English speakers as "American" and Korean speakers as "Korean" regardless of race, suggesting that young children prioritize language over race when thinking about nationality. Nine- and 10-year-olds (N = 181) attended to language and race and their nationality judgments varied across cultures. These results suggest that associations between nationality and social category membership emerge early in life and are shaped by cultural context., (© 2017 The Authors. Child Development © 2017 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.)

Despite early emerging and impressive linguistic abilities, young children demonstrate ostensibly puzzling beliefs about the nature of language. In some circumstances monolingual children even express the belief that an individual's language is more stable than her race. The present research investigated bilingual children's thinking about the relative stability of language and race (Kinzler & Dautel, 2012). Five-to six-year-old bilingual children were asked to judge whether a target child who varied in race (White or Black) and language (English or French) would grow up to be an adult who maintained the target child's race or her language. Similar to many monolingual children, a heterogeneous group of bilingual children on average chose the language-match. Yet French-English bilingual children were relatively more likely to choose the race-match, especially when tested in their non-dominant language. Specific experience with relevant languages, and communicating in a non-dominant language, may contribute to children's developing metalinguistic success and their thinking about social categorization., (Copyright © 2017 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.)

Many rituals are socially stipulated such that engaging in a group's rituals can fundamentally signal membership in that group. Here, we asked whether infants infer information about people's social affiliation based on whether those people perform the same ritualistic action versus different actions. We presented 16-month-old infants with two people who used the same object to achieve the same goal: turning on a light. In a first study, the actions that the actors used to turn on the light had key properties of ritual: they were not causally necessary to reach the overall goal, and there were no features of the situation that required doing the particular actions. We varied whether the two actors performed the same action or performed different actions to turn on the light. Infants expected people who used the same ritualistic action to be more likely to affiliate than people who used different actions. A second study indicated that these results were not due to perceptual similarity: when the differences in the actors' actions were not marked by properties of ritual, but were instead due to situational constraints, infants expected the actors to affiliate. Thus, infants understand the social significance of people engaging in common, potentially ritualistic actions, and expect these actions to provide information about third-party social relationships., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Developmental psychology can shed light on (1) the intuitive systems that underlie folk-economic beliefs (FEBs), and (2) how FEBs are created and revised. Boyer & Petersen (B&P) acknowledge the first, but we argue that they do not seriously consider the second. FEBs vary across people (and within a person), and much of this variation may be explained by socialization, social context, and social learning.

Past research finds that monolingual and bilingual children prefer native speakers to individuals who speak in unfamiliar foreign languages or accents. Do children in bilingual contexts socially distinguish among familiar languages and accents and, if so, how do their social preferences based on language and accent compare? The current experiments tested whether 5- to 7-year-olds in two bilingual contexts in the United States demonstrate social preferences among the languages and accents that are present in their social environments. We compared children's preferences based on language (i.e., English vs. their other native language) and their preferences based on accent (i.e., English with a native accent vs. English with a non-native [yet familiar] accent). In Experiment 1, children attending a French immersion school demonstrated no preference between English and French speakers but preferred American-accented English to French-accented English. In Experiment 2, bilingual Korean American children demonstrated no preference between English and Korean speakers but preferred American-accented English to Korean-accented English. Across studies, bilingual children's preferences based on accent (i.e., American-accented English over French- or Korean-accented English) were not related to their own language dominance. These results suggest that children from diverse linguistic backgrounds demonstrate social preferences for native-accented speakers. Implications for understanding the potential relation between social reasoning and language acquisition are discussed., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Forming conceptually-rich social categories helps people to navigate the complex social world by allowing them to reason about the likely thoughts, beliefs, actions, and interactions of others, as guided by group membership. Nevertheless, social categorization often has nefarious consequences. We suggest that the foundation of the human ability to form useful social categories is in place in infancy: social categories guide the inferences infants make about the shared characteristics and social relationships of other people. We also suggest that the ability to form abstract social categories may be separable from the eventual negative downstream consequences of social categorization, including prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping. Although a tendency to form inductively-rich social categories appears early in ontogeny, prejudice based on each particular category dimension may not be inevitable., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Language provides rich social information about its speakers. For instance, adults and children make inferences about a speaker's social identity, geographic origins, and group membership based on her language and accent. Although infants prefer speakers of familiar languages (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007), little is known about the developmental origins of humans' sensitivity to language as marker of social identity. We investigated whether 9-month-olds use the language a person speaks as an indicator of that person's likely social relationships. Infants were familiarized with videos of two people who spoke the same or different languages, and then viewed test videos of those two individuals affiliating or disengaging. Results suggest that infants expected two people who spoke the same language to be more likely to affiliate than two people who spoke different languages. Thus, infants view language as a meaningful social marker and use language to make inferences about third-party social relationships., (Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.)

Early exposure to multiple languages can enhance children's communication skills, even when children are effectively monolingual (Fan, Liberman, Keysar & Kinzler, ). Here we report evidence that the social benefits of multilingual exposure emerge in infancy. Sixteen-month-old infants participated in a communication task that required taking a speaker's perspective to understand her intended meaning. Infants were presented with two identical toys, such as two cars. One toy was mutually visible to both the infant and the speaker, but the other was visible only to the infant and was blocked from the speaker's view by an opaque barrier. The speaker requested the mutually visible toy and we evaluated whether infants understood the speaker's request. Whereas monolingual infants were at chance in choosing between the two toys, infants with multilingual exposure reliably chose the toy the speaker requested. Successful performance was not related to the degree of exposure to other languages, suggesting that even minimal multilingual exposure may enhance communication skills., (© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Selecting appropriate foods is a complex and evolutionarily ancient problem, yet past studies have revealed little evidence of adaptations present in infancy that support sophisticated reasoning about perceptual properties of food. We propose that humans have an early-emerging system for reasoning about the social nature of food selection. Specifically, infants' reasoning about food choice is tied to their thinking about agents' intentions and social relationships. Whereas infants do not expect people to like the same objects, infants view food preferences as meaningfully shared across individuals. Infants' reasoning about food preferences is fundamentally social: They generalize food preferences across individuals who affiliate, or who speak a common language, but not across individuals who socially disengage or who speak different languages. Importantly, infants' reasoning about food preferences is flexibly calibrated to their own experiences: Tests of bilingual babies reveal that an infant's sociolinguistic background influences whether she will constrain her generalization of food preferences to people who speak the same language. Additionally, infants' systems for reasoning about food is differentially responsive to positive and negative information. Infants generalize information about food disgust across all people, regardless of those people's social identities. Thus, whereas food preferences are seen as embedded within social groups, disgust is interpreted as socially universal, which could help infants avoid potentially dangerous foods. These studies reveal an early-emerging system for thinking about food that incorporates social reasoning about agents and their relationships, and allows infants to make abstract, flexible, adaptive inferences to interpret others' food choices., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Early language exposure is essential to developing a formal language system, but may not be sufficient for communicating effectively. To understand a speaker's intention, one must take the speaker's perspective. Multilingual exposure may promote effective communication by enhancing perspective taking. We tested children on a task that required perspective taking to interpret a speaker's intended meaning. Monolingual children failed to interpret the speaker's meaning dramatically more often than both bilingual children and children who were exposed to a multilingual environment but were not bilingual themselves. Children who were merely exposed to a second language performed as well as bilingual children, despite having lower executive-function scores. Thus, the communicative advantages demonstrated by the bilinguals may be social in origin, and not due to enhanced executive control. For millennia, multilingual exposure has been the norm. Our study shows that such an environment may facilitate the development of perspective-taking tools that are critical for effective communication., (© The Author(s) 2015.)

Does contextual information about disgust influence children's food consumption and subjective experience of taste? Three- to eight-year-old children (N = 60) were presented with two identical foods, yet children were led to believe that one food had been contaminated by sneezing and licking, while the other was clean. When given the opportunity to eat the foods, 5- to 8-year-old children consumed more clean food and rated the clean food's taste more positively; younger children did not distinguish between the foods. The relation between contamination and subjective taste held even among children who ate both foods and had direct evidence that they were identical. These data indicate that children's consumption behavior and food preferences are influenced by information external to foods themselves., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The inherence heuristic provides an intriguing and novel explanation for early thought in a variety of domains. Exploring similarities and differences in inherent reasoning across social and nonsocial domains can help us understand the role that inherent thinking plays in the development of human reasoning and the process by which more elaborate essentialist reasoning develops.

Predicting others' affiliative relationships is critical to social cognition, but there is little evidence of how this ability develops. We examined 9-month-old infants' inferences about 3rd-party affiliation based on shared and opposing evaluations. Infants expected 2 people who expressed shared evaluations to interact positively, whereas they expected 2 people who expressed opposing evaluations to interact negatively. A control condition revealed that infants' expectations could not be due to mere perceptual repetition. Thus, an abstract understanding that 3rd-party affiliation can be based on shared intentions has roots in the 1st year of life. These findings have implications for understanding humans' earliest representations of the social world., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.)

The negativity bias in human cognition emerges in infancy and continues throughout childhood. To fully understand the relationship between differences in attention to negative stimuli and variance in political ideologies, it is critical to consider human development and the process by which early individual differences in negativity unfold and are shaped by both genes and environment.

Past research reveals a tension between children's preferences for egalitarianism and ingroup favoritism when distributing resources to others. Here we investigate how children's evaluations and expectations of others' behaviors compare. Four- to 10-year-old children viewed events where individuals from two different groups distributed resources to their own group, to the other group, or equally across groups. Groups were described within a context of intergroup competition over scarce resources. In the Evaluation condition, children were asked to evaluate which resource distribution actions were nicer. In the Expectation condition, children were asked to predict which events were more likely to occur. With age, children's evaluations and expectations of others' actions diverged: Children evaluated egalitarian actions as nicer yet expected others to behave in ways that benefit their own group. Thus, children's evaluations about the way human social actors should behave do not mirror their expectations concerning those individuals' actions., (Copyright © 2013 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.)

Adults evaluate others based on their speech, yet little is known of the developmental trajectory by which accent attitudes are acquired. Here we investigate the development of American children's attitudes about Northern- and Southern-accented American English. Children in Illinois (the "North") and Tennessee (the "South") evaluated the social desirability, personality characteristics, and geographic origins of Northern- and Southern-accented individuals. Five- to 6-year-old children in Illinois preferred the Northern-accented speakers as potential friends, yet did not demonstrate knowledge of any stereotypes about the different groups; 5-6-year-old children in Tennessee did not show a preference towards either type of speaker. Nine- to 10-year-old children in both Illinois and Tennessee evaluated the Northern-accented individuals as sounding "smarter" and "in charge", and the Southern-accented individuals as sounding "nicer." Thus, older children endorse similar stereotypes to those observed in adulthood. These accent attitudes develop in parallel across children in different regions and reflect both positive and negative assessments of a child's own group.

Three experiments investigated 5- to 6-year-old monolingual English-speaking American children's sociolinguistic evaluations of others based on their accent (native, foreign) and social actions (nice, mean, neutral). In Experiment 1, children expressed social preferences for native-accented English speakers over foreign-accented speakers, and they judged the native-accented speakers to be "American." In Experiments 2 and 3, the accented speakers were depicted as being nicer than the relatively meaner native speakers. Children's social preferences and judgments of others' personalities varied as a function of behavior; in particular, children disliked individuals who committed negative social actions. In contrast, children's judgments of nationality hinged exclusively on accent; across all conditions, children evaluated native-accented English speakers to be "American," regardless of whether they were nice or mean. These findings contribute to an understanding of the nature of children's reasoning about language as a social category and have implications for future research investigating children's thinking about language as a marker of national group identity., ((PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).)

Developmental psychologists have devoted significant attention to investigating how children learn from others' actions, emotions, and testimony. Yet most of this research has examined children's socially guided learning about artifacts. The present article focuses on a domain that has received limited attention from those interested in the development of social cognition: food. We begin by reviewing the available literature on infants' and children's development in the food domain and identify situations in which children evidence both successes and failures in their interactions with foods. We focus specifically on the role that other people play in guiding what children eat and argue that understanding patterns of successes and failures in the food domain requires an appreciation of eating as a social phenomenon. We next propose a series of questions for future research and suggest that examining food selection as a social phenomenon can shed light on mechanisms underlying children's learning from others and provide ideas for promoting healthy social relationships and eating behaviors early in development.

Past research provides evidence that children use at least 2 potentially competing strategies when choosing informants: they attend to informants' past accuracy and to their social identity (e.g., their status as native- vs. foreign-accented speakers). We explore how children reconcile these 2 strategies when they are put in conflict and whether children's response changes across development. In Experiment 1 (N = 61), 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children watched a native- and a foreign-accented English speaker label novel objects with novel names. All 3 age groups preferred the names provided by the native speaker. Next, 1 of the 2 speakers named familiar objects accurately, whereas the other speaker named them inaccurately. In a subsequent series of test trials, again with novel objects, 4- and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, were likely to endorse the names provided by the accurate speaker, regardless of her accent. In Experiment 2 (N = 72) 4-year-olds first watched a native- and a foreign-accented speaker name familiar objects, but the relative accuracy of the 2 speakers varied across conditions (100% vs. 0% correct; 75% vs. 25% correct). Subsequently, the 2 speakers provided novel names for novel objects. In each condition, 4-year-olds endorsed the names provided by the more accurate speaker, regardless of her accent. We propose that during the preschool years, children increasingly rely on past reliability when selecting informants.

Behavioral research indicates that human females are more empathic than males, a disparity that widens from childhood to adulthood. Nevertheless, the extent to which such sex differences are an artifact of self-report indices is unclear. The present study compared age-related sex differences in both self-report and neurophysiological measures of empathic arousal, a primary building block of empathy. Participants included sixty-five 4-17-year-old children (mean 11.5±3.5 years) who completed the Bryant Empathy Scale, and were scanned while viewing animated clips depicting people being hurt. Female participants scored higher than males on self-reported dispositional empathy, a difference that increased with age. In contrast, no sex-related differential changes were detected in hemodynamic responses or in pupil dilation, with no interaction between sex and age. Results suggest a dissociation between explicit ratings and neurophysiological measures of empathic arousal. Past observed sex differences in empathy may reflect females' greater willingness to report empathic experiences. Findings are also discussed in terms of discrepancies in the methods used to assess affective responding and how they relate to the multi-faceted construct of empathy., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Group-based social hierarchies exist in nearly every society, yet little is known about whether children understand that they exist. The present studies investigated whether 3- to 10-year-old children (N=84) in South Africa associate higher status racial groups with higher levels of wealth, one indicator of social status. Children matched higher value belongings with White people more often than with multiracial or Black people and with multiracial people more often than with Black people, thus showing sensitivity to the de facto racial hierarchy in their society. There were no age-related changes in children's tendency to associate racial groups with wealth differences. The implications of these results are discussed in light of the general tendency for people to legitimize and perpetuate the status quo., (© 2012 The Authors. Child Development © 2012 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.)

Monolingual English-speaking children in the United States express social preferences for speakers of their native language with a native accent. Here we explore the nature of children's language-based social preferences through research with children in South Africa, a multilingual nation. Like children in the United States, Xhosa South African children preferred speakers of their first language (Xhosa) to speakers of a foreign language (French). Thus, social preferences based on language are observed not only among children with limited exposure to cultural and linguistic variation but also among children living in a diverse linguistic environment. Moreover, Xhosa children attending school in English expressed social preferences for speakers of English over speakers of Xhosa, even when tested by a Xhosa-speaking experimenter. Thus, children's language-based social preferences do not depend exclusively on preferences for more familiar or intelligible speech but also extend to preferences for speech that may convey higher status in the child's society.

Three experiments investigated whether a negativity bias in social perception extends to preschool-aged children's memory for the details of others' social actions and experiences. After learning about individuals who committed nice or mean social actions, children in Experiment 1 were more accurate at remembering who was mean compared with who was nice. In Experiment 2, children showed a memory advantage for the specific details of actions committed by mean individuals compared with nice individuals. In Experiment 3, children exhibited better memory for the details of mean actions compared with nice actions when the vignettes were presented from the perspective of the recipients instead of the perpetrators of these actions. Taken together, these findings suggest that children show heightened memory for the details of negative social actions over positive social actions. Such a memory bias may be advantageous in helping children to predict potentially threatening situations in the future., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Infants learn from adults readily and cooperate with them spontaneously, but how do they select culturally appropriate teachers and collaborators? Building on evidence that children demonstrate social preferences for speakers of their native language, Experiment 1 presented 10-month-old infants with videotaped events in which a native and a foreign speaker introduced two different toys. When given a chance to choose between real exemplars of the objects, infants preferentially chose the toy modeled by the native speaker. In Experiment 2, 2.5-year-old children were presented with the same videotaped native and foreign speakers, and played a game in which they could offer an object to one of two individuals. Children reliably gave to the native speaker. Together, the results suggest that infants and young children are selective social learners and cooperators, and that language provides one basis for this selectivity.

Across four studies, we directly compared children's essentialist reasoning about the stability of race and language throughout an individual's lifespan. Monolingual English-speaking children were presented with a series of images of children who were either White or Black; each face was paired with a voice clip in either English or French. Participants were asked which of two adults each target child would grow up to be - one who was a 'match' to the target child in race but not language, and the other a 'match' in language but not race. Nine- to 10-year-old European American children chose the race-match, rather than the language-match. In contrast, 5-6-year-old European American children in both urban, racially diverse, and rural, racially homogeneous environments chose the language-match, even though this necessarily meant that the target child would transform racial categories. Although surprising in light of adult reasoning, these young children demonstrated an intuition about the relative stability of an individual's language compared to her racial group membership. Yet, 5-6-year-old African American children, similar to the older European American children, chose the race-match, suggesting that membership in a racial minority group may highlight children's reasoning about race as a stable category. Theoretical implications for our understanding of children's categorization of human kinds are discussed., (© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.)

Whether emotion is a source of moral judgments remains controversial. This study combined neurophysiological measures, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, eye-tracking, and pupillary response with behavioral measures assessing affective and moral judgments across age. One hundred and twenty-six participants aged between 4 and 37 years viewed scenarios depicting intentional versus accidental actions that caused harm/damage to people and objects. Morally, salient scenarios evoked stronger empathic sadness in young participants and were associated with enhanced activity in the amygdala, insula, and temporal poles. While intentional harm was evaluated as equally wrong across all participants, ratings of deserved punishments and malevolent intent gradually became more differentiated with age. Furthermore, age-related increase in activity was detected in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in response to intentional harm to people, as well as increased functional connectivity between this region and the amygdala. Our study provides evidence that moral reasoning involves a complex integration between affective and cognitive processes that gradually changes with age and can be viewed in dynamic transaction across the course of ontogenesis. The findings support the view that negative emotion alerts the individual to the moral salience of a situation by bringing discomfort and thus can serve as an antecedent to moral judgment.

Minority-race children in North America and Europe often show less own-race favoritism than children of the majority (White) race, but the reasons for this asymmetry are unresolved. The present research tested South African children in order to probe the influences of group size, familiarity, and social status on children's race-based social preferences. We assessed South African children's preferences for members of their country's majority race (Blacks) compared to members of other groups, including Whites, who ruled South Africa until 1994 and who remain high in status. Black children (3-13 years) tested in a Black township preferred people of their own gender but not race. Moreover, Black, White, and multiracial children (4-9 years) tested in a racially diverse primary school showed in-group bias by gender but not by race: all favored people who were White. Relative familiarity and numerical majority/minority status therefore do not fully account for children's racial attitudes, which vary with the relative social status of different racial groups., (2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.)