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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.

A recent proposal suggests that the cognitive mechanisms involved in generating explanations (e.g., long-term and working memory) lead to an “inherence bias” in the content of the explanations generated. That is, explanations tend to rely on inherent or intrinsic features more often than would be normatively warranted. Here, we investigated a prediction of this account: namely, that participants’ expertise in a domain should mitigate the inherence bias in their explanations in that domain, in part because experts have a broader and more accessible knowledge base about the domain, which might include extrinsic, contextual features. Across two studies (total N = 391), we asked participants how much they agree with inherent and extrinsic explanations for a variety of phenomena and measured their expertise in the relevant domains via self-report (e.g., how many books or articles they’d read). As predicted, in both studies greater expertise predicted lower inherence bias, ps < .05.

Mixed-effects models are an analytic technique for modeling repeated measurement or nested data. This paper explains the logic of mixed-effects modeling and describes two examples of mixed-effects analyses using R. The intended audience of the paper is psychologists who specialize in cognitive development research. Therefore, the concepts and examples covered will focus primarily on repeated-measurement data resulting from studies in which participants respond to multiple items or trials. However, many of the concepts and examples we cover will likely be of use to readers outside this area of psychology. Finally, we discuss recommendations for dealing with practical challenges, suggest approaches for troubleshooting, and provide guidance on reporting results from mixed-effects models.

In certain domains, people represent some of an individual's properties (e.g., a tiger's ferocity), but not others (e.g., a tiger's being in the zoo), as stemming from the assumed "essence" of the individual's category. How do children identify which properties of an individual are essentialized and which are not? Here, we examine whether formal explanations--that is, explanations that appeal to category membership (e.g., "That's ferocious 'because it's a tiger'")--help children to identify which properties are essentialized. We investigated this question in two domains: animal kinds (Study 1) and social categories (specifically, gender; Studies 2 and 3). Across studies, we introduced children to novel behaviors and preferences of individuals using either a formal explanation or closely matched wording that did not express a formal explanation. To measure the extent to which children essentialized the novel properties, we assessed their inferences about the stability, innateness, and generalizability of these properties. In Study 1 (N = 104; 61 girls, 43 boys; predominantly White and multiracial children from high-income backgrounds), we found that formal explanations led 5- and 6-year-old children to view novel properties of individual animals as more stable across time. In Studies 2 and 3 (total N = 163; 84 girls, 79 boys; predominantly White, Asian, and multiracial children from high-income backgrounds), we found that formal explanations led 6-year-olds, but not 5-year-olds, to view novel properties of individual girls and boys as more stable across contexts. These studies highlight an important mechanism by which formal explanations guide conceptual development.

Feeling like an impostor is common among successful individuals, but particularly among women and early-career professionals. Here, we investigated how gender and career-stage differences in impostor feelings vary as a function of the contexts that academics have to navigate. In particular, we focused on a powerful but underexplored contextual feature: the extent to which raw intellectual talent (i.e., "brilliance") is prized in an academic field. We hypothesized that gender and career-stage differences in impostor feelings would be magnified in fields that value brilliance. We tested this hypothesis using the largest sample of academics that has been brought to bear on the impostor phenomenon to date, with over 4,000 academics recruited from nine research-intensive U.S. universities and representing more than 80 fields across the natural and social sciences, the humanities, and medicine. Consistent with our hypothesis, the more that success in a field was perceived to require brilliance, the more that women--especially women from racial/ethnic groups that are traditionally underrepresented in academia--and early-career academics felt like impostors. Impostor feelings were also related to a lower sense of belonging in a field and lower self-efficacy, highlighting the potential negative implications of the impostor phenomenon for academics' long-term success and for the diversity of fields that value brilliance.

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 (M[subscript age] = 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 = 0.16-0.23). The more parents used person responses, the poorer children's later math adjustment (|[beta]|s = 0.06-0.16).

School underachievement is a persistent problem in the United States. Direct-to-student, computer-delivered growth-mindset interventions have shown promise as a way to improve achievement for students at risk of failing in school; however, these interventions benefit only students who happen to be in classrooms that support growth-mindset beliefs. Here, we tested a teacher-delivered growth-mindset intervention for U.S. adolescents in Grades 6 and 7 that was designed to both impart growth-mindset beliefs and create a supportive classroom environment where those beliefs could flourish (N = 1,996 students, N = 50 teachers). The intervention improved the grades of struggling students in the target class by 0.27 standard deviations, or 2.81 grade percentage points. The effects were largest for students whose teachers endorsed fixed mindsets before the intervention. This large-scale, randomized controlled trial demonstrates that growth-mindset interventions can produce gains when delivered by teachers.

People tend to explain events using inherent more than extrinsic factors, a phenomenon known as the inherence bias. This bias is hypothesized to be more pronounced when cognitive resources are scarce. Here, we tested an important prediction of this account: namely, that aging and cognitive impairment should increase the inherence bias in explanation. Participants were shown vignettes of surprising scientific discoveries, and were asked to generate and evaluate explanations for those events. Our results indicate that as age increased, participants were more likely to generate inherent explanations, though age did not lead participants to endorse more inherent explanations when generation was not required. Older adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment generated a similar proportion of inherent explanations as healthy adults on average, though they did not do so increasingly with age. These findings suggest that cognitive deficits due to aging can have downstream effects on how we engage in complex reasoning.

Research shows that there is a strong cultural bias against women: Many people believe that women are less intellectually talented than men (Kirkcaldy et al., 2007; Upson & Friedman, 2012), and these beliefs emerge in childhood. For example, girls as young as six were less motivated than boys to pursue gender-neutral activities that were described as being for children who are “really smart” and more inclined toward activities intended for “hardworking” children (Bian, Cimpian, & Leslie, 2015). This study investigates whether framing activities as stereotypically masculine or feminine alters the impact of messages about intellectual ability on 6- and 7-year-olds’ selection of preferred activities. Preliminary findings (N=75) indicate that making activities stereotypically feminine reduces girls’ preference for "hardworking" over "smart" games. Such results suggest that presenting young girls with toys that are targeted specifically to them might counteract the effects of negative gender stereotypes about intelligence.

Language can be used to express broad, unquantified generalizations about both categories (e.g., "Dogs bark") and individuals (e.g., "Daisy barks"). Although these two classes of statements are commonly assumed to arise from the same linguistic phenomenon--"genericity"--the literature to date has not offered a direct experimental comparison of the conditions under which they are endorsed (i.e., their truth conditions). Here, we provide such a comparison by testing whether endorsement of generics about categories and individuals is affected in similar ways by the conceptual content of the properties being generalized. Consistent with this possibility, six experiments (N = 1,265) and an internal meta-analysis reveal that endorsement of generics about both categories and individuals is facilitated when the properties being generalized are distinctive or dangerous, suggesting systematic similarities in the truth conditions of generics about categories and individuals. The experiments also suggest that these facilitative effects do not extend to statements with overt quantification ("all/always" and "some/sometimes"). Thus, the present studies provide the first empirical evidence indicating that generics about categories and generics about individuals represent a unified phenomenon. These findings contribute to theories of genericity and inform our understanding of how language shapes social interactions.

A common misconception about math is that it requires raw intellectual talent or "brilliance." Only students who possess this sort of brilliance are assumed to be capable of success in math-related subjects. This harmful myth has far-reaching consequences for the success of girls and children from ethnic-minority backgrounds in these subjects. Because women and minorities are stereotyped as lacking brilliance, the myth that success in math requires this trait is a barrier that students from these groups have to overcome. In the first part of this paper, we detail the pervasiveness of this myth and explore its relation to gender and race gaps in math and beyond. In the second part, we highlight some potential sources of this myth in children's everyday experiences and offer some strategies for debunking it.

To what extent are research results influenced by subjective decisions that scientists make as they design studies? Fifteen research teams independently designed studies to answer five original research questions related to moral judgments, negotiations, and implicit cognition. Participants from 2 separate large samples (total N > 15,000) were then randomly assigned to complete 1 version of each study. Effect sizes varied dramatically across different sets of materials designed to test the same hypothesis: Materials from different teams rendered statistically significant effects in opposite directions for 4 of 5 hypotheses, with the narrowest range in estimates being d = -0.37 to + 0.26. Meta-analysis and a Bayesian perspective on the results revealed overall support for 2 hypotheses and a lack of support for 3 hypotheses. Overall, practically none of the variability in effect sizes was attributable to the skill of the research team in designing materials, whereas considerable variability was attributable to the hypothesis being tested. In a forecasting survey, predictions of other scientists were significantly correlated with study results, both across and within hypotheses. Crowdsourced testing of research hypotheses helps reveal the true consistency of empirical support for a scientific claim. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

An individuals intelligence mindset describes their implicit beliefs about whether intelligence is fixed (fixed mindset)or malleable (growth mindset). Here, we introduce a computational framework to unify and build upon findings in themindsets literature. We postulate that individuals maintain a mental model of others skill, in which current skill is thesum of innate skill (1) and skill acquired from experience (growth potential (2) times fraction of potential realised (3)).An observed current skill level is consistent with multiple combinations of (1), (2), and (3). To disambiguate, the modelobserver performs probabilistic inference, which requires priors. In particular, we conceptualise a fixed mindset usinga high-variance prior over innate skill and a low-variance, low-mean prior over growth potential. Through proofs andsimulations, we demonstrate that our model accounts for empirical findings in terms of the latent psychological processes.Our results offer promise for a computational cognitive science of mindsets.

Is exposing students to role models an effective tool for diversifying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)? So far, the evidence for this claim is mixed. Here, we set out to identify systematic sources of variability in STEM role models' effects on student motivation: If we determine "which role models" are effective for "which students," we will be in a better position to maximize role models' impact as a tool for diversifying STEM. A systematic narrative review of the literature (55 articles) investigated the effects of role models on students' STEM motivation as a function of several key features of the role models (their perceived competence, their perceived similarity to students, and the perceived attainability of their success) and the students (their gender, race/ethnicity, age, and identification with STEM). We conclude with four concrete recommendations for ensuring that STEM role models are motivating for students of all backgrounds and demographics--an important step toward diversifying STEM.

Understanding the development and structure of people's concepts of national groups can contribute to an understanding of their behavior in the political arena, including perhaps the recent rise in nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Here, we provide a developmental investigation of concepts of national groups in a sample of 5- to 8-year-old Canadian children (N = 79). Using an extensive battery of measures, we assessed the extent to which children conceive of national groups as socially constructed versus as having deeper, perhaps biological, "essences" that shape their members' physical and psychological makeup. At younger ages, Canadian children tended to essentialize national groups, including in a biological sense. At older ages, the biological conception of national groups subsided, but children continued to view these groups as meaningful and informative. A statistical comparison with 5- to 8-year-old American children's responses to the same measures (N = 70; using data from Hussak & Cimpian, 2019) revealed a great degree of overlap, despite substantial differences between the two countries in how national identity is conceived and described. These findings add an important piece to our understanding of the development of concepts of national groups.

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.

We present the data from a crowdsourced project seeking to replicate findings in independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. In this Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) initiative, 25 research groups attempted to replicate 10 moral judgment effects from a single laboratory's research pipeline of unpublished findings. The 10 effects were investigated using online/lab surveys containing psychological manipulations (vignettes) followed by questionnaires. Results revealed a mix of reliable, unreliable, and culturally moderated findings. Unlike any previous replication project, this dataset includes the data from not only the replications but also from the original studies, creating a unique corpus that researchers can use to better understand reproducibility and irreproducibility in science.

This crowdsourced project introduces a collaborative approach to improving the reproducibility of scientific research, in which findings are replicated in qualified independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. Our goal is to establish a non-adversarial replication process with highly informative final results. To illustrate the Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) approach, 25 research groups conducted replications of all ten moral judgment effects which the last author and his collaborators had “in the pipeline” as of August 2014. Six findings replicated according to all replication criteria, one finding replicated but with a significantly smaller effect size than the original, one finding replicated consistently in the original culture but not outside of it, and two findings failed to find support. In total, 40% of the original findings failed at least one major replication criterion. Potential ways to implement and incentivize pre-publication independent replication on a large scale are discussed.

Despite having the raw ability to pursue careers in science and engineering, gifted girls often shy away from such careers. Here, the authors explore two explanations for this puzzling phenomenon. Specifically, they argue that exposure to (a) negative stereotypes about women's intellectual abilities and (b) stereotypes about scientists as "nerdy," eccentric loners may undermine gifted girls' confidence in their ability to succeed in science and engineering, their sense of belonging in these fields, and--ultimately--their interest. The authors also suggest evidence-based strategies for inoculating girls against these stereotypes and boosting their interest in science and engineering.

American youth are more prone to storm and stress during adolescence than are Chinese youth (e.g., American youth's engagement in school declines more). However, it is unclear why. This research examined differences in conceptions of adolescence in the United States and China. Using both open- and closed-ended measures, youth (N = 397; 50 % female; mean age = 13.19 years) reported on their views of teens. American (vs. Chinese) youth were more likely to see adolescence as a time of decreased family responsibility along with increased individuation from parents, school disengagement, and peer orientation. Conceptions of adolescence as a time of dampened family responsibility and heightened school disengagement contributed to American (vs. Chinese) youth being less engaged in school over the seventh and eighth grades. The findings suggest that culture shapes ideas about adolescence, which contribute to differences in American and Chinese youth's engagement in school over this phase.

What cognitive processes underlie scientific explanation? Although scientific reasoning is often careful and methodical,we hypothesize that it is also influenced by an intuitive explanatory process: namely, an inherence heuristic (Cimpian &Salomon, 2014, BBS). The central claim of the inherence heuristic proposal is that, when people construct explanations, theyoversample inherent facts about the entities whose behavior they are attempting to explain. We investigated the influence of thisheuristic process on explanations for novel and historical scientific phenomena in chemistry, biology, and physics. Participantswere provided with short vignettes describing unexpected outcomes of experiments and were asked to explain these outcomes.As predicted, explanations were couched primarily in terms of inherent features of the entities involved. Importantly, this was soeven though such features were not mentioned in the vignettes but extrinsic factors were (e.g., high altitude, unusual location).These findings elucidate the psychological processes that underlie scientific explanation.

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.

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]