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Researchers commonly use puppets in development science. Amongst other things, puppets are employed to reduce social hierarchies between child participants and adult experimenters akin to peer interactions. However, it remains controversial whether children treat puppets like real-world social partners in these settings. This study investigated children's imitation of causally irrelevant actions (i.e., over-imitation) performed by puppet, adult, or child models. Seventy-two German children (Age[subscript Range] = 4.6-6.5 years; 36 girls) from urban, socioeconomically diverse backgrounds observed a model retrieving stickers from reward containers. The model performed causally irrelevant actions either in contact with the reward container or not. Children were more likely to over-imitate adults' and peers' actions as compared to puppets' actions. Across models, they copied contact actions more than no-contact actions. While children imitate causally irrelevant actions from puppet models to some extent, their social learning from puppets does not necessarily match their social learning from real-world social agents, such as children or adults.

Interactions with peers are fundamental to socio-cognitive development, but assessing peer interactions in standardized experiments is challenging. Therefore, researchers commonly utilize puppetry to simulate peers. This Registered Report investigated urban German children's (Age[subscript Range] = 3.5-4.5 years; N = 144; 76[male gender symbol]) mind ascriptions and social cognition to test whether they treat puppets like peers, adults, or neither. Children attributed less mind properties to puppets than peers or adults. However, children's social cognition (i.e., normativity, prosociality, and theory of mind) varied little across partners. Puppetry relies on children's ability for pretense, but can provide valid insights into socio-cognitive development. Implications for using puppets as stand-ins for peers in developmental research are discussed.

Creating objects can increase our evaluation of them, even when we compare them to physically identical copies (IKEA effect). Here we evaluate the influence of collaboration on the IKEA effect in two societies--the United Kingdom and India. One hundred twenty-eight 5-to-6-year-old children (48% female, 50% British middle class, 50% Indian middle class) assembled toys in pairs. Half of the children collaborated to assemble a single toy and half assembled their own toy. In both societies, children demonstrated an IKEA effect (?2p = .19), valuing their own creation over an identical copy. This was the case regardless of whether children collaborated or worked independently. In summary, it seems that the IKEA effect is a potent bias that is present in diverse societies and is insensitive to others' contributions in a collaborative environment.

Cheating is harmful to others and society at large. Promises have been shown to increase honesty in children, but their effectiveness has not been compared between different cultural contexts. In a study (2019) with 7‐ to 12‐year‐olds (N = 406, 48% female, middle‐class), voluntary promises reduced cheating in Indian, but not in German children. Children in both contexts cheated, but cheating rates were lower in Germany than in India. In both contexts, cheating decreased with age in the (no‐promise) control condition and was unaffected by age in the promise condition. These findings suggest that there may exist a threshold beyond which cheating cannot be further reduced by promises. This opens new research avenues on how children navigate honesty and promise norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Refugee youth constitute around a third of the refugee population in Germany. We studied the experiences of newly arrived Syrian and Iraqi refugee youth, aged 14 to 18 years (N = 20), in Germany. We utilized semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis to investigate (a) the main challenges faced by youth and (b) their main coping resources to deal with these challenges. We grouped challenges into three levels: the individual level, the immediate social level, and the broader societal level. The most frequently mentioned challenges in our sample related to psychological wellbeing, school, friendship, accommodation, and discrimination. Youth reported relying on social support (friends, family, social services) and on themselves (through avoidance, persistence, activity seeking, active engagement) to cope with their challenges. Our findings provide insights into refugee youth's experiences in Germany, encompassing the acculturative, developmental, and generational aspects of their lives and demonstrating their coping and resilience. We discuss our results in relation to the literature on refugee youth in high-income countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers commonly use puppets in development science. Amongst other things, puppets are employed to reduce social hierarchies between child participants and adult experimenters akin to peer interactions. However, it remains controversial whether children treat puppets like real‐world social partners in these settings. This study investigated children's imitation of causally irrelevant actions (i.e., over‐imitation) performed by puppet, adult, or child models. Seventy‐two German children (AgeRange = 4.6–6.5 years; 36 girls) from urban, socioeconomically diverse backgrounds observed a model retrieving stickers from reward containers. The model performed causally irrelevant actions either in contact with the reward container or not. Children were more likely to over‐imitate adults' and peers' actions as compared to puppets' actions. Across models, they copied contact actions more than no‐contact actions. While children imitate causally irrelevant actions from puppet models to some extent, their social learning from puppets does not necessarily match their social learning from real‐world social agents, such as children or adults. Research Highlights: We examined children's over‐imitation from adult, child, and puppet models to validate puppetry as an approach to simulate non‐hierarchical interactions.Children imitated adults and child models at slightly higher rates than puppets.This effect was present regardless of whether the irrelevant actions involved physical contact to the reward container or not.In our study children's social learning from puppets does not match their social learning from human models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals in all societies conform to their cultural group's conventional norms, from how to dress on certain occasions to how to play certain games. It is an open question, however, whether individuals in all societies actively enforce the group's conventional norms when others break them. We investigated third-party enforcement of conventional norms in 5- to 8-y-old children (n = 376) from eight diverse small-scale and large-scale societies. Children learned the rules for playing a new sorting game and then, observed a peer who was apparently breaking them. Across societies, observer children intervened frequently to correct their misguided peer (i.e., more frequently than when the peer was following the rules). However, both the magnitude and the style of interventions varied across societies. Detailed analyses of children's interactions revealed societal differences in children's verbal protest styles as well as in their use of actions, gestures, and nonverbal expressions to intervene. Observers' interventions predicted whether their peer adopted the observer's sorting rule. Enforcement of conventional norms appears to be an early emerging human universal that comes to be expressed in culturally variable ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]