Children's cost-benefit analysis about agents who act for the greater good.

Acting for the greater good often involves paying a personal cost to benefit the collective. In two studies, we investigate how children (N = 184, M = 8.02 years, SD = 1.

School-age children are more skeptical of inaccurate robots than adults.

We expect children to learn new words, skills, and ideas from various technologies. When learning from humans, children prefer people who are reliable and trustworthy, yet children also forgive people's occasional mistakes. Are the dynamics of children learning from technologies, which can also be unreliable, similar to learning from humans? We tackle this question by focusing on early childhood, an age at which children are expected to master foundational academic skills.

Is it personal or is it social? The interaction of knowledge domain and statistical evidence in U.S. and Chinese preschoolers' social generalizations.

Children make inferences about the social world by observing human actions. However, human actions can be ambiguous: They can be sources of information about personal, idiosyncratic characteristics of individuals or socially shared knowledge. In two cross-cultural studies ( = 420; = 4.

The development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior: Protocol for Wave 1 data collection with children and parents by the Developing Belief Network.

The Developing Belief Network is a consortium of researchers studying human development in diverse social-cultural settings, with a focus on the interplay between general cognitive development and culturally specific processes of socialization and cultural transmission in early and middle childhood. The current manuscript describes the study protocol for the network's first wave of data collection, which aims to explore the development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior. This work is guided by three key research questions: (1) How do children represent and reason about religious and supernatural agents? (2) How do children represent and reason about religion as an aspect of social identity? (3) How are religious and supernatural beliefs transmitted within and between generations? The protocol is designed to address these questions via a set of nine tasks for children between the ages of 4 and 10 years, a comprehensive survey completed by their parents/caregivers, and a task designed to elicit conversations between children and caregivers.

Testimony and observation of statistical evidence interact in adults' and children's category-based induction.

Hearing generic or other kind-relevant claims can influence the use of information from direct observations in category learning. In the current study, we ask how both adults and children integrate their observations with testimony when learning about the causal property of a novel category. Participants were randomly assigned to hear one of four types of testimony: generic, quantified "all", specific, or only labels.

Children are eager to take credit for prosocial acts, and cost affects this tendency.

We report two experiments on children's tendency to enhance their reputations through communicative acts. In the experiments, 4-year-olds (N = 120) had the opportunity to inform a social partner that they had helped him in his absence. In a first experiment, we pitted a prosocial act ("Let's help clean up for Doggie!") against an instrumental act ("Let's move these out of our way").

The minds of machines: Children's beliefs about the experiences, thoughts, and morals of familiar interactive technologies.

Children are developing alongside interactive technologies that can move, talk, and act like agents, but it is unclear if children's beliefs about the agency of these household technologies are similar to their beliefs about advanced, humanoid robots used in lab research. This study investigated 4-11-year-old children's ( = 127, = 7.50, = 2.

Rational learners and parochial norms.

Parochial norms are narrow in social scope, meaning they apply to certain groups but not to others. Accounts of norm acquisition typically invoke tribal biases: from an early age, people assume a group's behavioral regularities are prescribed and bounded by mere group membership. However, another possibility is rational learning: given the available evidence, people infer the social scope of norms in statistically appropriate ways.

Walking in Her Shoes: Pretending to Be a Female Role Model Increases Young Girls' Persistence in Science.

Pretend play is a ubiquitous learning tool in early childhood, enabling children to explore possibilities outside of their current reality. Here, we demonstrate how pretend play can be leveraged to empower girls in scientific domains. American children ages 4 to 7 years ( = 240) played a challenging science activity in one of three conditions.

Imagination and social cognition in childhood.

Imagination is a cognitive process used to generate new ideas from old, not just in the service of creativity and fantasy, but also in our ordinary thoughts about alternatives to current reality. In this article, I argue for the central function of imagination in the development of social cognition in infancy and childhood. In Section 1, I review a work showing that even in the first year of life, social cognition can be viewed through a nascent ability to imagine the physical possibilities and physical limits on action.

When it's not easy to do the right thing: Developmental changes in understanding cost drive evaluations of moral praiseworthiness.

Recent work identified a shift in judgments of moral praiseworthiness that occurs late in development: adults recognize the virtue of moral actions that involve resolving an inner conflict between moral desires and selfish desires. Children, in contrast, praise agents who do the right thing in the absence of inner conflict. This finding stands in contrast with other work showing that children incorporate notions of cost and effort into their social reasoning.

Face-to-face learning enhances the social transmission of information.

Learning from others provides the foundation for culture and the advancement of knowledge. Learning a new visuospatial skill from others represents a specific challenge-overcoming differences in perspective so that we understand what someone is doing and why they are doing it. The "what" of visuospatial learning is thought to be easiest from a shared 0° first-person perspective and most difficult from a 180° third-person perspective.

The Community-Engaged Lab: A Case-Study Introduction for Developmental Science.

Due to the closing of campuses, museums, and other public spaces during the pandemic, the typical avenues for recruitment, partnership, and dissemination are now unavailable to developmental labs. In this paper, we show how a shift in perspective has impacted our lab's ability to successfully transition to virtual work during the COVID-19 shut-down. This begins by recognizing that any lab that relies on local communities to engage in human research is .

Culture moderates the relationship between self-control ability and free will beliefs in childhood.

We investigate individual, developmental, and cultural differences in self-control in relation to children's changing belief in "free will" - the possibility of acting against and inhibiting strong desires. In three studies, 4- to 8-year-olds in the U.S.

Leaving a Choice for Others: Children's Evaluations of Considerate, Socially-Mindful Actions.

People value those who act with others in mind even as they pursue their own goals. Across three studies (N = 566; 4- to 6-year-olds), we investigated children's developing understanding of such considerate, socially-mindful actions. By age 6, both U.

The ontogeny of cumulative culture: Individual toddlers vary in faithful imitation and goal emulation.

The success of human culture depends on early emerging mechanisms of social learning, which include the ability to acquire opaque cultural knowledge through faithful imitation, as well as the ability to advance culture through flexible discovery of new means to goal attainment. This study explores whether this mixture of faithful imitation and goal emulation is based in part on individual differences which emerge early in ontogeny. Experimental measurements and parental reports were collected for a group of 2-year-old children (N = 48, age = 23-32 months) on their imitative behavior as well as other aspects of cognitive and social development.

The cultural roots of free will beliefs: How Singaporean and U.S. Children judge and explain possibilities for action in interpersonal contexts.

Making sense of human actions involves thinking about both endogenous influences (the internal mental states of agents) and exogenous influences (social, moral, and interpersonal constraints). Culture impacts how we weight the relative causal influence of these two influences. To examine these cultural influences in depth, we asked 147 4-11-year-olds in 3 cultural groups (Singaporean Chinese, Singaporean Malay, and U.

The choice is yours: Infants' expectations about an agent's future behavior based on taking and receiving actions.

Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and independence, outcomes that are the result of an agent's own choices may hold more predictive value than similar outcomes that are the result of another person's choices. Across two experiments we test the ontogeny of this phenomenon; that is, whether infants are sensitive to the causal history associated with an agent's acquisition of an object.

Selectivity in toddlers' behavioral and emotional reactions to prosocial and antisocial others.

Whereas some evidence suggests that toddlers consider targets' deservingness when deciding whom to help, other research demonstrates that toddlers help indiscriminately. The present findings shed light on this discrepancy by demonstrating that although toddlers do exhibit selectivity in giving behaviors, their emotional responses are comparatively indiscriminate. Specifically, in Experiment 1, 20-month-olds (N = 64) were more likely to give preferred toys to prosocial versus antisocial puppets, and more likely to withhold toys from antisocial versus prosocial puppets.

The influence of understanding and having choice on children's prosocial behavior.

Humans are remarkable moral evaluators. However, between infancy and the preschool-age, children move from merely evaluating the world in terms of moral ("good"/"bad") terms to acting upon it in meaningful (prosocial and antisocial) ways. We argue that children's developing understanding and experience of choice and agency has profound behavioral consequences for this development in prosocial behavior.

Young children consider individual authority and collective agreement when deciding who can change rules.

Young children demonstrate awareness of normativity in various domains of social learning. It is unclear, however, whether children recognize that rules can be changed in certain contexts and by certain people or groups. Across three studies, we provided empirical evidence that children consider individual authority and collective agreement when reasoning about who can change rules.

What I don't know won't hurt you: The relation between professed ignorance and later knowledge claims.

Testimony is a valuable source of information for young learners, in particular if children maintain vigilance against errors while still being open to learning from imperfectly knowledgeable sources. We find support for this idea by examining how children evaluate individual speakers who present very different epistemic risks by being previously ignorant or inaccurate. Results across 2 experiments show that children attribute knowledge to (Experiment 1) and endorse new claims made by speakers (Experiment 2) who previously professed ignorance about familiar object labels, but not to speakers whose labels were previously inaccurate.