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When adult men are made to feel gender‐atypical, they often lash out with aggression, particularly when they are pressured (vs. autonomously motivated) to be gender‐typical. Here, we examined the development of this phenomenon. Specifically, we provided a first experimental test of whether threatening adolescent boys' perceived gender typicality elicits aggression as a function of their pressured (vs. autonomous) motivation to be gender‐typical. We also investigated whether this causal link emerges as a function of boys' chronological age versus pubertal development. Participants were a geographically diverse sample of 207 adolescent US boys (ages 10–14; 23.2% boys of color) and one of their parents. Boys played a "game" and received randomly‐assigned feedback that their score was atypical versus typical of their gender. For boys in mid‐to‐late puberty (but not before), feedback that they are gender‐atypical predicted an aggressive reaction, particularly among boys whose motivation to be gender‐typical was pressured (vs. autonomous). Next, we explored which aspects of boys' social environments predicted their pressured motivation to be gender‐typical. Boys' pressured motivation was positively correlated with their perceptions that their parents and peers would be "upset" if they deviated from gender norms, as well as with their parents' endorsement of so‐called hegemonic beliefs about masculinity (i.e., that men should hold power over women). Parents with these beliefs resided in more conservative areas, had less formal education, and had lower incomes. Our results inform theorizing on gender identity development and lay the foundation for mitigating the harmful effects of gender typicality threat among adult men. Research Highlights: Similar to young adult men, adolescent boys in mid‐to‐late puberty (but not before) responded with aggression to perceived threats to their gender typicality.Aggression was heightened among boys whose motivation to be gender‐typical was pressured (i.e., driven by social expectations) rather than autonomous.Which boys showed pressured motivation? Those whose parents endorsed hegemonic beliefs about masculinity (e.g., that men should have more power than people of other genders).Hegemonic beliefs about masculinity were strongest among parents who resided in more conservative US counties, had less formal education, and had lower incomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is often believed to require intellectual talent ("brilliance"). Given that many cultures associate men more than women with brilliance, this belief poses an obstacle to women's STEM pursuits. Here, we investigated the developmental roots of this phenomenon, focusing specifically on young children's beliefs about math (N = 174 U.S. students in Grades 1–4; 93 girls, 81 boys; 52% White, 17% Asian, 13% Hispanic/Latinx). We found that field‐specific ability beliefs (FABs) that associate success in math (vs. reading/writing) with brilliance are already present in early elementary school. We also found that brilliance‐oriented FABs about math are negatively associated with elementary school students' (and particularly girls') math motivation—specifically, their math self‐efficacy and interest. The early emergence of brilliance‐oriented FABs about math and the negative relation between FABs and math motivation underscore the need to understand the sources and long‐term effects of these beliefs. Research Highlights: Field‐specific ability beliefs (FABs) are beliefs about the extent to which intellectual talent (or "brilliance") is required for success in a particular field or context.Among adults, brilliance‐oriented FABs are an obstacle to diversity in science and technology, but the childhood antecedents of these beliefs are not well understood.The present study (N = 174) found that FABs that associate success in math (vs. reading/writing) with brilliance were already present in Grades 1−4.Brilliance‐oriented FABs about math were negatively associated with elementary school students' (and particularly girls') math motivation—specifically, their math self‐efficacy and interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When do adolescents' dreams of promising journeys through high school translate into academic success? This monograph reports the results of a collaborative effort among sociologists and psychologists to systematically examine the role of schools and classrooms in disrupting or facilitating the link between adolescents' expectations for success in math and their subsequent progress in the early high school math curriculum. Our primary focus was on gendered patterns of socioeconomic inequality in math and how they are tethered to the school's peer culture and to students' perceptions of gender stereotyping in the classroom. To do this, this monograph advances Mindset × Context Theory. This orients research on educational equity to the reciprocal influence between students' psychological motivations and their school‐based opportunities to enact those motivations. Mindset × Context Theory predicts that a student's mindset will be more strongly linked to developmental outcomes among groups of students who are at risk for poor outcomes, but only in a school or classroom context where there is sufficient need and support for the mindset. Our application of this theory centers on expectations for success in high school math as a foundational belief for students' math progress early in high school. We examine how this mindset varies across interpersonal and cultural dynamics in schools and classrooms. Following this perspective, we ask: 1.Which gender and socioeconomic identity groups showed the weakest or strongest links between expectations for success in math and progress through the math curriculum?2.How did the school's peer culture shape the links between student expectations for success in math and math progress across gender and socioeconomic identity groups?3.How did perceptions of classroom gender stereotyping shape the links between student expectations for success in math and math progress across gender and socioeconomic identity groups? We used nationally representative data from about 10,000 U.S. public school 9th graders in the National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM) collected in 2015–2016—the most recent, national, longitudinal study of adolescents' mindsets in U.S. public schools. The sample was representative with respect to a large number of observable characteristics, such as gender, race, ethnicity, English Language Learners (ELLs), free or reduced price lunch, poverty, food stamps, neighborhood income and labor market participation, and school curricular opportunities. This allowed for generalization to the U.S. public school population and for the systematic investigation of school‐ and classroom‐level contextual factors. The NSLM's complete sampling of students within schools also allowed for a comparison of students from different gender and socioeconomic groups with the same expectations in the same educational contexts. To analyze these data, we used the Bayesian Causal Forest (BCF) algorithm, a best‐in‐class machine‐learning method for discovering complex, replicable interaction effects. Chapter IV examined the interplay of expectations, gender, and socioeconomic status (SES; operationalized with maternal educational attainment). Adolescents' expectations for success in math were meaningful predictors of their early math progress, even when controlling for other psychological factors, prior achievement in math, and racial and ethnic identities. Boys from low‐SES families were the most vulnerable identity group. They were over three times more likely to not make adequate progress in math from 9th to 10th grade relative to girls from high‐SES families. Boys from low‐SES families also benefited the most from their expectations for success in math. Overall, these results were consistent with Mindset × Context Theory's predictions. Chapters V and VI examined the moderating role of school‐level and classroom‐level factors in the patterns reported in Chapter IV. Expectations were least predictive of math progress in the highest‐achieving schools and schools with the most academically oriented peer norms, that is, schools with the most formal and informal resources. School resources appeared to compensate for lower levels of expectations. Conversely, expectations most strongly predicted math progress in the low/medium‐achieving schools with less academically oriented peers, especially for boys from low‐SES families. This chapter aligns with aspects of Mindset × Context Theory. A context that was not already optimally supporting student success was where outcomes for vulnerable students depended the most on student expectations. Finally, perceptions of classroom stereotyping mattered. Perceptions of gender stereotyping predicted less progress in math, but expectations for success in math more strongly predicted progress in classrooms with high perceived stereotyping. Gender stereotyping interactions emerged for all sociodemographic groups except for boys from high‐SES families. The findings across these three analytical chapters demonstrate the value of integrating psychological and sociological perspectives to capture multiple levels of schooling. It also drew on the contextual variability afforded by representative sampling and explored the interplay of lab‐tested psychological processes (expectations) with field‐developed levers of policy intervention (school contexts). This monograph also leverages developmental and ecological insights to identify which groups of students might profit from different efforts to improve educational equity, such as interventions to increase expectations for success in math, or school programs that improve the school or classroom cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in political psychology largely ignores early childhood. This is likely due to the assumption that young children lack the cognitive capacity and social understanding needed for political thought. Challenging this assumption, we argue that research with young children is both possible and important for political psychologists. We focus on the topic of political ideology to demonstrate our argument. We review recent evidence revealing that social cognition in early childhood—and even infancy—is already oriented toward group living in ways that set the foundation of political thought. Young children notice key dimensions of group living (e.g., group boundaries, hierarchies, norms) and use them to guide their reasoning and behavior. Beyond these basic proto‐political sensitivities, young children also display proto‐political attitudes: valenced and/or prescriptive cognitions about dimensions of group living that have political significance (e.g., disliking nonconforming group members, believing that hierarchy between groups is wrong). Even more reminiscent of mainstream political psychology, young children's proto‐political sensitivities and attitudes exhibit systematic individual differences that can roughly be mapped onto three ideological orientations common among adults: authoritarianism, social dominance, and hawkish ideology. We discuss ways in which research with young children is critical for a complete understanding of adult political psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new parent-report measure was used to examine parents' person and process responses to children's math performance. Twice over a year from 2017 to 2020, American parents (N = 546; 80% mothers, 20% other caregivers; 62% white, 21% Black, 17% other) reported their responses and math beliefs; their children's (Mage  = 7.48 years; 50% girls, 50% boys) math adjustment was also assessed. Factor analyses indicated parents' person and process responses to children's math success and failure represent four distinct, albeit related, responses. Person (vs. process) responses were less common and less likely to accompany views of math ability as malleable and failure as constructive (|r|s = .16-.23). The more parents used person responses, the poorer children's later math adjustment (|β|s = .06-.16). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research has explored children's gender stereotypes about specific intellectual domains, such as mathematics and science, but less is known about the acquisition of domain‐general stereotypes about the intellectual abilities of women and men. During 2017 and 2018, the authors administered Implicit Association Tests to Chinese Singaporean adults and 8‐ to 12‐year‐olds (N = 731; 58% female) to examine the gender stereotype that portrays exceptional intellectual ability (e.g., genius, brilliance) as a male attribute. This gender‐brilliance stereotype was present among adults and children and for both Chinese and White stereotype targets. It also was stronger among older children and among children whose parents also showed it. This early‐emerging stereotype may be an obstacle to gender equity in many prestigious employment sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People commonly think of the mind and the brain as distinct entities that interact, a view known as dualism. At the same time, the public widely acknowledges that science attributes all mental phenomena to the workings of a material brain, a view at odds with dualism. How do people reconcile these conflicting perspectives? We propose that people distort claims about the brain from the wider culture to fit their dualist belief that minds and brains are distinct, interacting entities: Exposure to cultural discourse about the brain as the physical basis for the mind prompts people to posit that mind–brain interactions are asymmetric, such that the brain is able to affect the mind more than vice versa. We term this hybrid intuitive theory neurodualism. Five studies involving both thought experiments and naturalistic scenarios provided evidence of neurodualism among laypeople and, to some extent, even practicing psychotherapists. For example, lay participants reported that "a change in a person's brain" is accompanied by "a change in the person's mind" more often than vice versa. Similarly, when asked to imagine that "future scientists were able to alter exactly 25% of a person's brain," participants reported larger corresponding changes in the person's mind than in the opposite direction. Participants also showed a similarly asymmetric pattern favoring the brain over the mind in naturalistic scenarios. By uncovering people's intuitive theories of the mind–brain relation, the results provide insights into societal phenomena such as the allure of neuroscience and common misperceptions of mental health treatments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do children reason about academic performance across development? A classic view suggests children's intuitive theories in this domain undergo qualitative changes. According to this view, older children and adults consider both effort and skill as sources of performance (i.e., a "performance = effort + skill" theory), but younger children can only consider effort (i.e., a "performance = effort" theory). Results from two studies (N = 240 children aged 4-9) contradict the claim of theory change, suggesting instead that children as young as 4 operate with an intuitive theory of academic performance that incorporates both effort and skill as explanatory concepts. This work reveals that children's understanding of academic performance is more continuous across development than previously assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describing behaviors as reflecting categories (e.g., asking children to "be helpers") has been found to increase pro-social behavior. The present studies (N = 139, ages 4-5) tested whether such effects backfire if children experience setbacks while performing category-relevant actions. In Study 1, children were asked either to "be helpers" or "to help," and then pretended to complete a series of successful scenarios (e.g., pouring milk) and unsuccessful scenarios (e.g., spilling milk while trying to pour). After the unsuccessful trials, children asked to "be helpers" had more negative attitudes. In Study 2, asking children to "be helpers" impeded children's helping behavior after they experienced difficulties while trying to help. Implications for how category labels shape beliefs and behavior are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The common stereotype that brilliance is a male trait is an obstacle to women's success in many prestigious careers. This gender‐brilliance stereotype is powerful in part because it seems to be acquired early in life and might thus shape girls' career aspirations. To date, however, research on this stereotype has not considered how its acquisition might intersect with (1) the other social identities that men and women are perceived to hold, and (2) the social identities that children themselves hold. The present study examined these open questions. First, we compared 5‐ and 6‐year‐old children's (N = 203) assumptions about the intellectual abilities of White men and women with their assumptions about the intellectual abilities of Black men and women. Second, we compared White children's assumptions about the intellectual abilities of men and women with those of children of color (primarily Latinx, Black, and Asian). The results suggested two main conclusions: First, children learn to associate White men (vs. women), but not Black men (vs. women), with brilliance. In fact, children generally see Black men as less brilliant than Black women. Second, the results suggested that the stereotype associating White men with brilliance is shared by children regardless of their own race. These results add considerable nuance to the literature on the development of gender stereotypes about intellectual ability and have implications for policies that might be implemented to prevent the negative effects of these stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We tested the hypothesis that political attitudes are influenced by an information‐processing factor – namely, a bias in the content of everyday explanations. Because many societal phenomena are enormously complex, people's understanding of them often relies on heuristic shortcuts. For instance, when generating explanations for such phenomena (e.g., why does this group have low status?), people often rely on facts that they can retrieve easily from memory – facts that are skewed toward inherent or intrinsic features (e.g., this group is unintelligent). We hypothesized that this bias in the content of heuristic explanations leads to a tendency to (1) view socioeconomic stratification as acceptable and (2) prefer current societal arrangements to alternative ones, two hallmarks of conservative ideology. Moreover, since the inherence bias in explanation is present across development, we expected it to shape children's proto‐political judgments as well. Three studies with adults and 4‐ to 8‐year‐old children (N = 784) provided support for these predictions: Not only did individual differences in reliance on inherent explanations uniquely predict endorsement of conservative views (particularly the stratification‐supporting component; Study 1), but manipulations of this explanatory bias also had downstream consequences for political attitudes in both children and adults (Studies 2 and 3). This work contributes to our understanding of the origins of political attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychological essentialism is a pervasive conceptual bias to view categories as reflecting something deep, stable, and informative about their members. Scholars from diverse disciplines have long theorized that psychological essentialism has negative ramifications for inter-group relations, yet little previous empirical work has experimentally tested the social implications of essentialist beliefs. Three studies ( N = 127, ages 4.5-6) found that experimentally inducing essentialist beliefs about a novel social category led children to share fewer resources with category members, but did not lead to the out-group dislike that defines social prejudice. These findings indicate that essentialism negatively influences some key components of inter-group relations, but does not lead directly to the development of prejudice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is debate about the abstractness of young children's self-concepts-specifically, whether they include representations of (a) general traits and abilities and (b) the global self. Four studies (N = 176 children aged 4-7) suggested these representations are indeed part of early self-concepts. Studies 1 and 2 reexamined prior evidence that young children cannot represent traits and abilities. The results suggested that children's seemingly immature judgments in previous studies were due to peculiarities of the task context not the inadequacy of children's self-concepts. Similarly, Studies 3 and 4 revealed that, contrary to claims of immaturity in reasoning about the global self, young children update their global self-evaluations in flexible, context-sensitive ways. This evidence suggests continuity in the structure of self-concepts across childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generic statements (e.g., 'Birds lay eggs') express generalizations about categories. Current theories suggest that people should be especially inclined to accept generics that involve threatening information. However, previous tests of this claim have focused on generics about non-human categories, which raises the question of whether this effect applies as readily to human categories. In Experiment 1, adults were more likely to accept generics involving a threatening (vs. a non-threatening) property for artifacts, but this negativity bias did not also apply to human categories. Experiment 2 examined an alternative hypothesis for this result, and Experiments 3 and 4 served as conceptual replications of the first experiment. Experiment 5 found that even preschoolers apply generics differently for humans and artifacts. Finally, Experiment 6 showed that these effects reflect differences between human and non-human categories more generally, as adults showed a negativity bias for categories of non-human animals, but not for categories of humans. These findings suggest the presence of important, early-emerging domain differences in people's judgments about generics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to carve the world into broad categories (e.g., DOG) made up of distinct individuals (e.g., Lassie and Toto) is essential for adaptive behavior and has been the focus of extensive research in cognitive and developmental psychology. Classic work on the development of category representations has revealed that they emerge early: Even infants can conceive of distinct objects as equivalent members of the same category. However, more recently, research on conceptual development has begun to suggest a stronger conclusion, namely that mental representations of categories are privileged by our cognitive systems relative to representations of similar, but noncategorical, entities. According to this research, which I review in this article, our minds may be structured to facilitate the acquisition, retention, and manipulation of category-level information. This conclusion goes beyond current theories of conceptual development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much evidence suggests that, from a young age, humans are able to generalize information learned about a subset of a category to the category itself. Here, we propose that-beyond simply being able to perform such generalizations-people are biased to generalize to categories, such that they routinely make spontaneous, implicit category generalizations from information that licenses such generalizations. To demonstrate the existence of this bias, we asked participants to perform a task in which category generalizations would distract from the main goal of the task, leading to a characteristic pattern of errors. Specifically, participants were asked to memorize two types of novel facts: quantified facts about sets of kind members (e.g., facts about all or many stups) and generic facts about entire kinds (e.g., facts about zorbs as a kind). Moreover, half of the facts concerned properties that are typically generalizable to an animal kind (e.g., eating fruits and vegetables), and half concerned properties that are typically more idiosyncratic (e.g., getting mud in their hair). We predicted that-because of the hypothesized bias-participants would spontaneously generalize the quantified facts to the corresponding kinds, and would do so more frequently for the facts about generalizable (rather than idiosyncratic) properties. In turn, these generalizations would lead to a higher rate of quantified-to-generic memory errors for the generalizable properties. The results of four experiments ( N = 449) supported this prediction. Moreover, the same generalizable-versus-idiosyncratic difference in memory errors occurred even under cognitive load, which suggests that the hypothesized bias operates unnoticed in the background, requiring few cognitive resources. In sum, this evidence suggests the presence of a powerful bias to draw generalizations about kinds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generic statements (e.g., 'Lions have manes') make claims about kinds (e.g., lions as a category) and, for adults, are distinct from quantificational statements (e.g., 'Most lions have manes'), which make claims about how many individuals have a given property. This article examined whether young children also understand that generics do not depend purely on quantitative information. Five-year-olds ( n = 36) evaluated pairs of questions expressing properties that were matched in prevalence but varied in whether adults accept them as generically true (e.g., 'Do lions have manes?' [true] vs. 'Are lions boys?' [false]). Results demonstrated that children evaluate generics based on more than just quantitative information. Data suggest that even young children recognize that generics make claims about kinds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generic sentences (e.g., 'Birds lay eggs') convey generalizations about entire categories and may thus be an important source of knowledge for children. However, these sentences cannot be identified by a simple rule, requiring instead the integration of multiple cues. The present studies focused on 3- to 5-year-olds' ( N = 91) use of morphosyntactic cues-in particular, on whether children can (a) interpret indefinite singular noun phrases (e.g., 'a strawberry') as generic and (b) use a verb's tense and aspect (e.g., 'A bat sleeps/slept/is sleeping upside down') to determine whether its subject noun phrase is generic. Children demonstrated sensitivity to both cues. Thus, solving the in-principle problem of identifying generics may not be beyond the reach of young children's comprehension skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These studies investigate how the distinction between generic sentences (e.g., 'Boys are good at math') and nongeneric sentences (e.g., 'Johnny is good at math') shapes children's social cognition. These sentence types are hypothesized to have different implications about the source and nature of the properties conveyed. Specifically, generics may be more likely to imply that the referred-to properties emerge naturally from an internal source, which may cause these properties to become essentialized. Four experiments ( N = 269 four-year-olds and undergraduates) confirmed this hypothesis but also suggested that participants only essentialize the information provided in generic form when this construal is consistent with their prior theoretical knowledge. These studies further current understanding of language as a means of learning about others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generic statements (e.g., 'Birds lay eggs') express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as 'Lorches have purple feathers' as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than generic sentences that were similar but did not have these connotations. In addition to clarifying important aspects of generics' meaning, these findings are applicable to a range of real-world processes such as stereotyping and political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]