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Adults' attraction to rare objects has been variously attributed to fundamental biases related to resource availability, self-related needs, or beliefs about social and market forces. The current three studies investigated the scarcity bias in 11- and 14-month-old infants, and 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 129). With slight methodological modifications, participants had to choose between one of 10 same-kind-items (abundant resource), or the only one of a different kind (scarce resource). It was found that a robust preference for the scarce resource appeared only at age 5 years. Thus, although a scarcity bias is not present in infancy, it emerges prior to comprehension of market forces. Possible accounts of this developmental finding are discussed.

The present research investigated the effect of ethnic–national identity on intergroup attitudes among Israeli children. Between 2019 and 2020, 136 Arab Muslim and 136 Jewish 5‐ and 10‐year‐olds (boys and girls) participated in one of four ethnic–national identity conditions: ingroup, outgroup, common identity, and control. In each condition, participants were described a city whose residents were defined according to the condition. Then, children were asked to "release" positive and negative animals to an ingroup city, an outgroup city, or a zoo. The results showed that highlighting a common identity improved attitudes across all children, but effect of ingroup and outgroup emphases varied between Jewish and Arab children. These results highlight the different dynamics of social identities among majority and minority children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kindergarteners treat certain social categories as natural kinds. This study addressed how children pick out social categories. Ninety-one 19-and 26-month-olds were familiarized to exemplars of categories of people (e.g., Blacks-Whites, men-women) and animals (e.g., cows-horses). Participants then saw a picture matching the familiarization category and another that did not, and were asked to select which was like the familiarization pictures. For half of the participants, a label was attached to familiarization exemplars, while for the other half, no label was mentioned. The main finding was that for the younger toddlers, labels significantly improved recognition of the categories of people, but not of animals. These results are taken to support the notion that social categories are indeed culturally constructed.

The present study compared 5-and 10-year-old North American and Israeli children's beliefs about the objectivity of different categories (n = 109). Children saw picture triads composed of two exemplars of the same category (e.g., two women) and an exemplar of a contrasting category (e.g., a man). Children were asked whether it would be acceptable or wrong for people in a different country to consider contrasting exemplars to be the same kind. It was found that children from both countries viewed gender as objectively correct and occupation as flexible. The findings regarding race and ethnicity differed in the two countries, revealing how an essentialist bias interacts with cultural input in directing children's conceptualization of social groups.

Two studies examined the inductive potential of various social categories among 144 kindergarten, 2nd-, and 6th-grade Israeli children from 3 sectors: secular Jews, religious Jews, and Muslim Arabs. Study 1--wherein social categories were labeled--found that ethnic categories were the most inductively powerful, especially for religious Jewish children. Study 2--wherein no social category labels were provided--found no differences across sectors either in the inductive potential of ethnic categories or in children's capacity to visually recognize social categories. These results stress the importance of labels and cultural background in children's beliefs about social categories. The implications of these findings for accounts of the development of social essentialism are discussed.

Four studies examined preschoolers' sensitivity to agents' knowledge of conventional forms. Three- to 4-year-olds heard a speaker apply either conventional or wrong labels to familiar objects (Studies 1 and 2, N = 57) or peculiar but correct labels (Study 3, N = 19). When then asked by the speaker for the referent of a novel label, children exposed to an accurate labeler were more likely to choose an unfamiliar object than children exposed to an inaccurate labeler. Study 4 (N = 36) replicated these findings using object functions instead of labels. Children hold an assumption of conventionality with regard to both object labels and functions, but they are selective in their application of this assumption toward agents who are knowledgeable of conventions in these domains.

Do children construe leaders as individuals whose position of power entails primarily more responsibility or more entitlement, compared with nonleaders? To address this question, 5‐year‐old children (n = 128) heard a story involving a hierarchical dyad (a leader and a nonleader) and an egalitarian dyad (two nonleaders), and then assessed protagonists' relative contributions to a collaborative endeavor (Experiments 1 and 2) or relative withdrawals from a common resource pool earned jointly (Experiment 3). Children expected a leader to contribute more toward a joint goal than its nonleader partner, and to withdraw an equal share (not more) from a common pool. Children thus gave evidence that they construed leaders as more responsible, rather than more entitled, relative to nonleaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present studies investigated the out-group homogeneity effect in 5- and 8-year-old Israeli and German children (n = 150) and adults (n = 96). Participants were asked to infer whether a given property (either biological or psychological) was true of an entire group-either the participants' in-group ("Jews" or "Germans") or their out-group ("Arabs" or "Turks"). To that end, participants had to select either a homogenous or a heterogeneous sample of group members. It was found that across ages and countries, participants selected heterogeneous samples less often when inferring the biological properties of out-compared to in-group members. No effect was found regarding psychological properties. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the origins of intergroup bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]