Search

The way that societies assign people to racial categories has far-reaching social, economic, and political consequences. One framework for establishing racial boundaries is based on ancestry , which historically has been leveraged to create rigid racial categories, particularly with respect to being categorized as White. A second framework is based on skin tone , which can vary within families and across the lifespan, and is thus more likely to blur racial boundaries. The persistence of these distinct cultural beliefs about race requires that they be transmitted to each new generation, but there have been few cross-cultural studies on their development during childhood. Participants (5- to 12-year-old children, N = 123) were from the United States, in which the ancestry model has been more prevalent, or from Brazil, in which the skin tone model has been more prevalent. In both countries, 5- to 7-year-olds endorsed the belief that skin tone determines race, for example, by assigning biological siblings with differing skin tones to different racial categories. However, racial concepts diverged among the 10- to 12-year-olds, with children from the United States shifting toward a classification based on ancestry and children in Brazil endorsing a classification based on skin tone even more strongly with age. These differing conceptions were especially evident with reference to White racial categorization: Older children from Brazil persisted in classifying lighter skinned people as White when they had African ancestry, unlike older children from the United States. These findings provide important insights into the developmental and cultural influences on racial classification systems. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Prior research documents that adults in Western cultures perceive others as more susceptible to social influence than themselves (Pronin et al., 2007). Study 1 ( N = 318) investigated the cultural generalizability of this asymmetric perception effect by examining young adults in South Korea, where conformity is relatively valued, and a comparison sample of young adults in the United States. The results documented that, counter to theoretical accounts emphasizing the centrality of motivated reasoning, the self-other distinction was just as strong in South Korea as it was in the United States. Study 2 ( N = 102) examined the development of this tendency among 6- to 12-year-old South Korean children and showed that this asymmetry is first present at around age 9. These findings suggest that asymmetric perceptions of conformity are robust and emerge over the course of development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

In a rapidly changing and diverse world, the ability to reason about conflicting perspectives is critical for effective communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. The current pre-registered experiments with children ages 7 to 11 years investigated the developmental foundations of this ability through a novel social reasoning paradigm and a computational approach. In the inference task, children were asked to figure out what happened based on whether two speakers agreed or disagreed in their interpretation. In the prediction task, children were provided information about what happened and asked to predict whether two speakers will agree or disagree. Together, these experiments assessed children's understanding that disagreement often results from ambiguity about what happened, and that ambiguity about what happened is often predictive of disagreement. Experiment 1 (N = 52) showed that children are more likely to infer that an ambiguous utterance occurred after learning that people disagreed (versus agreed) about what happened and found that these inferences become stronger with age. Experiment 2 (N = 110) similarly found age-related change in children's inferences and also showed that children could reason in the forward direction, predicting that an ambiguous utterance would lead to disagreement. A computational model indicated that although children's ability to predict when disagreements might arise may be critical for making the reverse inferences, it did not fully account for age-related change., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

When making inferences about the mental lives of others (e.g., others' preferences), it is critical to consider the extent to which the choices we observe are constrained. Prior research on the development of this tendency indicates a contradictory pattern: Children show remarkable sensitivity to constraints in traditional experimental paradigms, yet often fail to consider real-world constraints and privilege inherent causes instead. We propose that one explanation for this discrepancy may be that real-world constraints are often stable over time and lose their salience. The present research tested whether children (N = 133, 5- to 12-year-old mostly US children; 55% female, 45% male) become less sensitive to an actor's constraints after first observing two constrained actors (Stable condition) versus after first observing two actors in contexts with greater choice (Not Stable condition). We crossed the stability of the constraint with the type of constraint: either the constraint was deterministic such that there was only one option available (No Other Option constraint) or, in line with many real-world constraints, the constraint was probabilistic such that there was another option, but it was difficult to access (Hard to Access constraint). Results indicated that children in the Stable condition became less sensitive to the probabilistic Hard to Access constraint across trials. Notably, we also found that children's sensitivity to constraints was enhanced in the Not Stable condition regardless of whether the constraint was probabilistic or deterministic. We discuss implications for children's sensitivity to real-world constraints. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: This research addresses the apparent contradiction that children are sensitive to constraints in experimental paradigms but are often insensitive to constraints in the real world. One explanation for this discrepancy is that constraints in the real world tend to be stable over time and may lose their salience. When probabilistic constraints (i.e., when a second option is available but hard to access) are stable, children become de-sensitized to constraints across trials. First observing contexts with greater choice increases children's sensitivity to both probabilistic and deterministic constraints., (© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

This research examines barriers to reporting academic dishonesty in early adulthood (Study 1; N = 92) and adolescence (Study 2; N = 137). Participants were asked to describe a recent time they observed a peer cheating and to reflect on their decision about whether to report the cheating. They also responded to hypothetical scenarios about observing typical cheating actions, and the presence of social motives (e.g., whether people who report tend to gain reputations for being snitches) was manipulated in each scenario. Even though participants judged reporting to be the morally right thing to do, doing so was rare and approval for it was low, especially in adolescence. Participants also tended to say they would rather be friends with people who do not report cheaters than with those who do. Participants reasoned about a variety of social concerns to support their judgments about reporting (e.g., concern about their relationship with the cheater, concerns for others' welfare), and the manipulated social motives in the hypothetical scenarios significantly influenced judgments about reporting. These findings inform our understanding of the social dynamics that contribute to decisions about policing academic honesty., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

When people are asked to recommend individuals they care about, they often grapple with conflicts regarding the level of honesty they should maintain when being truthful could potentially hinder those individuals' chances of receiving beneficial opportunities. In the current study, we examined how adolescents evaluate people based on how they respond to such dilemmas, with a focus on how it affects judgments of interpersonal and epistemic trustworthiness. We tested a sample of high school students in the southwestern United States (N = 78; M age  = 16.45 years), who were asked about a moral dilemma in which a story character needed to decide whether to recommend an unqualified friend. We experimentally manipulated whether the friend was very close to the standard (requiring a small exaggeration) or was far from the standard (requiring a large exaggeration) between participants. Across both exaggeration conditions, we observed a dissociation in judgments of epistemic and interpersonal trustworthiness: Lie-tellers were judged to be more interpersonally trustworthy than epistemically trustworthy, whereas truth-tellers were judged to be more epistemically trustworthy than interpersonally trustworthy. These results show that adolescents are capable of using information about an individual's lie-telling versus truth-telling decisions to make highly nuanced social inferences., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Parenting by lying is a practice in which parents lie to their children to influence their emotions or behavior. Recently, researchers have tried to document the nature of this phenomenon and to understand its causes and consequences. The present research provides an overview of the research in the emerging field, describes some key theoretical and methodological challenges in studying this topic, and proposes a theoretical framework for understanding parenting by lying and for guiding future research to advance our knowledge about this understudied parenting practice., Competing Interests: The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article., (© The Author(s) 2023.)

How do people come to opposite causal judgments about societal problems, such as whether a public health policy reduced COVID-19 cases? The current research tests an understudied cognitive mechanism in which people may agree about what actually happened (e.g., that a public health policy was implemented and COVID-19 cases declined), but can be made to disagree about the counterfactual, or what would have happened otherwise (e.g., whether COVID-19 cases would have declined naturally without intervention) via comparison cases. Across two preregistered studies (total N = 480), participants reasoned about the implementation of a public policy that was followed by an immediate decline in novel virus cases. Study 1 shows that people's judgments about the causal impact of the policy could be pushed in opposite directions by emphasizing comparison cases that imply different counterfactual outcomes. Study 2 finds that people recognize they can use such information to influence others. Specifically, in service of persuading others to support or reject a public health policy, people systematically showed comparison cases implying the counterfactual outcome that aligned with their position. These findings were robust across samples of U.S. college students and politically and socioeconomically diverse U.S. adults. Together, these studies suggest that implied counterfactuals are a powerful tool that individuals can use to manufacture others' causal judgments and warrant further investigation as a mechanism contributing to belief polarization., (© 2024 The Authors. Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Cognitive Science Society (CSS).)

This research evaluated the hypothesis that the act of offering an incentive produces anticipated social benefits that are distinct from the benefits associated with the incentive itself. Across three preregistered studies, 3- to 5-year-old children in China (total N = 210) were given an opportunity to wait for an additional sticker (Studies 1 and 3) or an edible treat (Study 2). Rewards were dispensed via a timer-controlled box that allowed the experimenter's apparent ability to learn how long children waited to be manipulated experimentally. Children waited only about half as long when they believed the experimenter would not find out how long they waited. When children were offered three prizes for waiting, anticipated social benefits still drove behavior at least as much as the reward. The findings demonstrate that children as young as 3 years are sensitive to anticipated social rewards when responding to offers of incentives.

Children's ethnicity-status associations are often studied in societies where one ethnic group possesses status across multiple dimensions, such as political influence and wealth. This study examined children's (6-12 years) and adults' representations of more complex hierarchies in Indonesia (N = 341; 38% Native Indonesian, 33% Chinese Indonesian, and 27% other ethnicities; 55% female, 36% male; 2021-2022), a society where ethnic groups hold distinct forms of status (on average, Native Indonesians have political influence; Chinese Indonesians have wealth). By 6.5 years, children associated Native Indonesians with political influence and Chinese Indonesians with wealth. Intersectional analyses indicated that ethnicity-status associations were stronger for male than female targets. Children of all ethnicities preferred Chinese Indonesians and preferences were predicted by wealth judgments., (© 2023 The Authors. Child Development published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Research in Child Development.)

People often hear stories about individuals who persist to overcome their constraints. While these stories can be motivating, emphasizing others' persistence may promote unwarranted judgments about constrained individuals who do not persist. Using a developmental social inference task (Study 1a: n = 124 U.S. children, 5-12 years of age; Study 1b: n = 135 and Study 2: n = 120 U.S. adults), the present research tested whether persistence stories lead people to infer that a constrained individual who does not persist, and instead accepts the lower-quality option that is available to them, prefers it over a higher-quality option that is out of reach. Study 1 found evidence for this effect in children (1a) and adults (1b). Even persistence stories about failed outcomes, which emphasize how difficult it would have been to get the higher-quality option, had this effect. Study 2 found that the effect generalized to adults' judgments about an individual facing a different type of constraint from those mentioned in the initial stories. Taken together, emphasizing others' persistence may encourage unwarranted judgments about individuals who are still constrained to lower-quality options. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Academic cheating is common, but little is known about its early emergence. It was examined among Chinese second to sixth graders (N = 2094; 53% boys, collected between 2018 and 2019) using a machine learning approach. Overall, 25.74% reported having cheated, which was predicted by the best machine learning algorithm (Random Forest) at a mean accuracy of 81.43%. Cheating was most strongly predicted by children's beliefs about the acceptability of cheating and the observed prevalence and frequency of peer cheating at school. These findings provide important insights about the early development of academic cheating, and how to promote academic integrity and limit cheating before it becomes entrenched. The present research demonstrates that machine learning can be effectively used to analyze developmental data., (© 2023 The Authors. Child Development © 2023 Society for Research in Child Development.)

Behavioral economics research has revealed that our decision-making can be biased by default settings. That is, all other things being equal, adults tend to choose default options even when the effort involved in choosing other options is minimal. Extensive evidence shows that default settings can systematically influence adult decisions in a wide variety of domains (e.g., pension choices, organ donation), but little is known about their developmental origin. Of interest in the present research is whether default settings can influence young children's decisions about whether to be honest. We investigated this question in two studies of 5- and 6-year-old Chinese children (total N = 120; 60 girls; M age  = 5.81, SD age  = 0.14). Each study used a specially designed device that allowed children to play a guessing game in either a Cheating Default condition in which they would cheat by doing nothing or in an Honesty Default condition in which they would be honest by doing nothing. In each condition, they had the option of taking a trivially easy action to override the default (pushing a button in Study 1 or moving a screen in Study 2). In both studies, children decided to cheat significantly more often in the Cheating Default condition than in the Honesty Default condition. Additionally, overall cheating rates were significantly higher in Study 2 than in Study 1 (55% vs. 25%), which suggests that even though the default setting effect generalized across different actions, the specific action in question can also affect the cheating rate. Taken together, these results indicate that default setting effects that have been observed in adults have origins in childhood, and they point toward new ways to use nudges to promote positive social development and moral decision-making., (Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

To make accurate causal inferences about social-group inequalities, people must consider structural causes . Structural causes are a distinct type of extrinsic cause-they are stable, interconnected societal forces that systematically advantage some social groups and disadvantage others. We propose a new cognitive framework to specify how people attribute inequality to structural causes. This framework is rooted in counterfactual theories of causal judgment and suggests that people will recognize structural factors as causal when they are perceived as "difference-making" for inequality above and beyond any intrinsic causes. Building on this foundation, our framework makes the following contributions. First, we propose specific types of evidence that support difference-making inferences about structural factors: within-group change (i.e., observing that disadvantaged groups' outcomes improve under better societal conditions) and well-matched between-group comparisons (i.e., observing that advantaged group members, who have similar baseline traits to the disadvantaged group, experience more favorable societal conditions and life outcomes). Second, we consider contextual, cognitive, and motivational barriers that may complicate the availability and acceptance of this evidence. We conclude by exploring how the framework might be applied in future research examining people's causal inferences about inequality.

How to distribute resources in a fair way is a fundamental source of conflict in human societies. A central dilemma that people begin to grapple with during childhood is the extent to which individuals should be rewarded based on merit at the expense of equality. The current study examined children's reasoning about this dilemma by testing whether they are sensitive to information about the motives of highly productive people when determining whether they should receive extra compensation. Across two studies, children (6- to 11-year-olds, total N = 143) judged high performers to be less deserving of extra resources when they were motivated by profit rather than being intrinsically motivated, and this pattern was more pronounced among the older children. The findings demonstrate that, with age, children increasingly consider motives when deciding whether productivity should be rewarded and that the tendency of adults to view profit motives as problematic has origins during childhood., (Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

There has been extensive research on the causes of academic cheating, but little is known about its consequences. The current research sought to fill this gap in the literature by examining how cheating by middle school children (total N = 198) affects their learning outcomes. In a naturalistic paradigm, children scored a math test they had taken previously, which gave them an opportunity to cheat by falsely scoring incorrect answers to be correct. Results from this phase showed that 54 % of the children cheated on at least one question. One week later, the children took the same test again, but this time without being given an opportunity to cheat. Among children who cheated, items they had answered incorrectly on the first round showed significantly less improvement on the second round if they had dishonestly scored them as correct rather than honestly scoring them as incorrect. This finding provides the first experimental evidence that academic cheating can interfere with children's learning., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

This research examined the effects of overhearing an adult praise an unseen child for not needing to work hard on an academic task. Five-year-old Han Chinese children (total N = 270 across three studies; 135 boys, collected 2020-2021) who heard this low effort praise tended to devalue effort relative to a baseline condition in which the overheard conversation lacked evaluative content. In Study 3, low effort praise increased children's endorsement of essentialist beliefs about ability and their interest in becoming the kind of person who does not need to work hard to succeed. The findings show that overhearing evaluative comments about other people, a pervasive feature of daily life, can have a systematic effect on young children's beliefs about achievement., (© 2022 The Authors. Child Development © 2022 Society for Research in Child Development.)

This research examined the effectiveness of using norms to promote honesty. Participants were Han Chinese children (N = 568, 50.4% male, 3.24 to 6.00 years, collected 2020-2022). Relative to children in a control condition, children in Study 1 were more likely to confess to having cheated in a game after being presented with a descriptive norm indicating that confessions are typical, or an injunctive norm indicating that most other children approve of confessing. Study 2 showed that this finding was not due to a methodological artifact, and Study 3 replicated the effect in a context in which the norm information was conveyed by someone other than the experimenter. The findings suggest that messages about social norms can influence children's honesty., (© 2022 The Authors. Child Development © 2022 Society for Research in Child Development.)

Academic cheating is a serious worldwide problem that begins during childhood. However, to date there has been little research on academic cheating with children before high school age. The current study used a naturalistic experimental paradigm to evaluate the possibility that systematically manipulating messages about the difficulty of a test can affect whether middle school children (N = 201) would cheat by reporting a falsely inflated test score. We found that test difficulty messaging significantly affected children's cheating behavior. Specifically, telling children that a test was either easy or hard produced higher rates of cheating than telling them that the difficulty level was on par with their current skills. In addition, among the children who chose to cheat, telling them that the test was easy led to a greater degree of cheating. These findings are consistent with theories of academic cheating that point to the importance of approach and avoidance motives in achievement motivation. The findings also suggest that simple messaging can have a significant impact on children's moral behavior and that seemingly innocuous messages such as describing the difficulty of a test can influence children's decisions about whether and how much to cheat., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Individuation training that helps humans see multiple other-race targets as distinct rather than as interchangeable can reduce children's implicit racial bias in the form of more negative other-race associations than own-race associations. However, little is known about which aspects of these interventions are critical for their effectiveness. The present research examines whether children need to learn to differentiate among multiple other-race individuals for these interventions to reduce their level of implicit racial bias, or whether differentiating a single other-race individual is sufficient. We addressed this question among 4-to-6-year-old Chinese children ( N  = 66, 31 girls) who engaged in coordinated movement with Black instructors for 2 min. There were two between-subject conditions: in a differentiation condition, there were four different Black instructors, and children had to learn to tell them apart, and in a no-differentiation condition, there was only one Black instructor. Implicit bias was measured using the IRBT, an implicit association test that was developed based on the IAT but is appropriate for young children. We found a reduction in implicit bias against Black people after this interaction in the differentiation condition, but not in the no-differentiation condition. These findings suggest that learning to differentiate among multiple other-race individuals plays a critical role in reducing children's implicit racial bias., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Qian, Heyman, Wu and Fu.)

People are sometimes tempted to lie for their own benefit if it would not harm others. For adults, dishonesty is the default response in these circumstances. The developmental origins of this phenomenon were investigated between 2019 and 2021 among 6- to 11-year-old Han Chinese children from China (N = 548, 49% female). Children had an opportunity to win prizes in a behavioral economics game (Experiment 1) or a temptation resistance game adapted from developmental psychology (Experiment 2). In each experiment, the youngest children showed a default tendency of honesty and there was an overall age-related shift toward a default tendency of dishonesty. These findings provide direct evidence of developmental change in the automatic and controlled processes that underlie moral behavior., (© 2022 The Authors. Child Development © 2022 Society for Research in Child Development.)

The present dataset was reported in a paper entitled "Effects of test difficulty messaging on academic cheating among middle school children" [1]. It reports the findings of an experimental study that used a naturalistic math test-taking paradigm to assess children's academic cheating behavior under different test difficulty messaging conditions. The participants were Grade 8 middle school children ( N  = 201). The primary dependent measures were whether each participant spontaneously decided to cheat ( presence of cheating ), and among participants who cheated, the specific number of test items on which they cheated ( extent of cheating ). We used logistic regression, ANOVA, and Pearson correlation to assess whether various predictor variables (e.g., conditions) predicted the presence of cheating or the extent of cheating. This dataset should be of interest to researchers who are interested in the development of moral behavior in children generally, and academic dishonesty in particular., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to affect the work reported in this paper., (© 2022 Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Learning from others allows young children to acquire vast amounts of information quickly, but doing so effectively also requires epistemic vigilance. Although preschool-age children have some capacity to engage in such processes, they often have trouble resisting information from misleading informants. The present research takes a novel strategic deception training approach to addressing this limitation. The approach is grounded in theoretical work on children's recognition of self-other equivalences (Meltzoff, 2007) and in the default tendency to view communication as helpful (Mascaro et al., 2017). Eighty 3-year-old Singaporean children ( M age = 39.36 months, 37 girls, 90.0% Chinese) were randomly assigned to either an experimental condition, in which they were trained on strategic deception, or to a conservation training control condition. Findings showed that the strategic deception training was effective in promoting epistemic vigilance on a semantic task that involved object naming and no pointing, although the effect did not extend to performance on an episodic task that involved pointing to object locations. These findings provide the first evidence of a causal link between young children's reasoning about how to deceive others and their resistance to being misled by others. In doing so, they shed light on the mechanisms that come into play when children learn epistemic vigilance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Cheating is a common human behavior but few studies have examined its emergence during early childhood. In three preregistered studies, a challenging math test was administered to 5- to 6-year-old children (total N = 500; 255 girls). An answer key was present as children completed the test, but they were instructed to not peek at it. In Study 1, many children cheated, but manipulations that reduced the answer key's accessibility in terms of proximity and visibility led to less cheating. Two follow-up studies showed that the answer key's visibility played a more significant role than its proximity. These findings suggest that subtle and seemingly insignificant alterations of the physical environment can effectively nudge young children away from acting dishonestly., (© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

The goal of the present research was to assess whether children's first interaction with a single outgroup member can significantly impact their general attitudes toward the outgroup as a whole. In two preregistered studies, 5- to 6-year-old Chinese children (total N = 147) encountered a Black adult from another country for the very first time, and they played a game together. General attitudes toward the outgroup were assessed using both implicit and explicit measures. In both studies, the interaction resulted in less negative explicit attitudes toward Black people, but more negative implicit attitudes. The results demonstrate for the first time that one encounter with a single outgroup member can impact children's general attitudes toward that group, and that it can have differential effects on implicit and explicit attitudes., (© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)