The social aspects of illness: Children's and parents' explanations of the relation between social categories and illness in a predominantly white U.S. sample.

The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has had a disproportionate impact on Black, low-income, and elderly individuals. We recruited 175 predominantly white children ages 5-12 and their parents (N = 112) and asked which of two individuals (differing in age, gender, race, social class, or personality) was more likely to get sick with either COVID-19 or the common cold and why. Children and parents reported that older adults were more likely to get sick than younger adults, but reported few differences based on gender, race, social class, or personality.

What makes Voldemort tick? Children's and adults' reasoning about the nature of villains.

How do children make sense of antisocial acts committed by evil-doers? We addressed this question in three studies with 434 children (4-12 years) and 277 adults, focused on participants' judgments of both familiar and novel fictional villains and heroes. Study 1 established that children viewed villains' actions and emotions as overwhelmingly negative, suggesting that children's well-documented positivity bias does not prevent their appreciation of extreme forms of villainy. Studies 2 and 3 assessed children's and adults' beliefs regarding heroes' and villains' moral character and true selves, using an array of converging evidence, including: how a character felt inside, whether a character's actions reflected their true self, whether a character's true self could change over time, and how an omniscient machine would judge a character's true self.

Learning the rules of the game: The role of generic "you" and "we" in shaping children's interpretations of norms.

A critical skill of childhood is learning social norms. We examine whether the generic pronouns "you" and "we," which frame information as applying to people in general rather than to a specific individual, facilitate this process. In one pre-registered experiment conducted online between 2020 and 2021, children 4- to 9-year-old primarily living in the midwestern U.

Iconic realism or representational blindness? How young children and adults reason about pictures and objects.

When reasoning about a representation (e.g., a toy lion), children often engage in "iconic realism," whereby representations are reported to have properties of their real-life referents.