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Biases about social groups emerge from a young age. This study examines whether statistically representative counterevidence – a randomly drawn sample from the social group – can change children’s attitudes and beliefs about minimally defined social groups. We found that 5- to 6-year-olds learned from the sample to change their attitudes and beliefs about minimal groups. However, they showed a negativity bias and an ingroup bias when they learned from the evidence. It was unclear whether 9- to 10-year-olds’ attitudes and beliefs can also be changed by this type of evidence. Future directions and implications of this study are discussed.

Children's intergroup attitudes arguably reflect different construals of in- and out-groups, whereby the former are viewed as composed of unique individuals and the latter of homogeneous members. In three studies, we investigated the scope of information (individual vs. category) Jewish-Israeli 5- and 8-year-olds prefer to receive about "real" in-group ("Jews") and out-group members ("Arabs" and "Scots") (Study 1, N = 64); the scope of information Jewish and Arab Israeli 8-year-olds prefer to receive about minimal in- and out-groups (Study 2, N = 64); and how providing such information affects children's intergroup attitudes (Study 3, N = 96). The main findings were that: (1) 8-year-olds requested category information more about out-groups than in-groups, and vice-versa regarding individual information--for both, "real" and minimal groups; and (2) providing individual information about a "conflict" out-group reduced attitudinal biases. These findings highlight children's differential construal of in- and out-groups and suggest ways for remedying biases toward out-groups.

Social relationships such as playmates and friendships are im-portant for children’s development. But relatively little isknown about how such relationships are formed. In two stud-ies, 5- to 6-year-old children chose their playmates in a hypo-thetical scenario that resembled a real-world social situation.The findings suggested that children used both the base-rateinformation about the social group and the adaptive samplingstrategy in playmate choice – they approached or avoided in-dividuals based on the group that the individuals belonged to,as well as their past experiences with the individuals.

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.

Adults value scarce objects, such as rare precious stones and limited edition items. This valuation may derive from an understanding of market forces and sociological considerations, but it may also be related to more basic cognitive and motivational processes. The present studies addressed these possibilities by investigating the development and cross-cultural prevalence of a preference for scarce objects. Children (N = 366) from Israel and Taiwan, ranging from 4 to 11 years of age, were given a choice between a scarce and an abundant reward. We found that whereas a preference for the scarce appeared among Israelis by age 7, it never appeared among the Taiwanese. These findings indicate that a scarcity preference emerges already at age 7, but only among children living in a culture that emphasizes self-individuality. These findings are discussed in light of cultural accounts of the development of self-motivations.

Previous research has suggested that infants exhibit a preference for familiar over unfamiliar social groups (e.g., preferring individuals from their own language group over individuals from a foreign language group). However, because past studies often employ forced-choice procedures, it is not clear whether infants' intergroup preferences are driven by positivity toward members of familiar groups, negativity toward members of unfamiliar groups, or both. Across six experiments, we implemented a habituation procedure to independently measure infants' positive and negative evaluations of speakers of familiar and unfamiliar languages. We report that by 1 year of age, infants positively evaluate individuals who speak a familiar language, but do not negatively evaluate individuals who speak an unfamiliar language (Experiments 1 and 2). Several experiments rule out lower-level explanations (Experiments 3-6). Together these data suggest that children's early social group preferences may be shaped by positive evaluations of familiar group(s), rather than negative evaluations of unfamiliar groups.

The Developing Belief Network is a consortium of researchers studying human development in diverse social-cultural settings, with a focus on the interplay between general cognitive development and culturally specific processes of socialization and cultural transmission in early and middle childhood. The current manuscript describes the study protocol for the network's first wave of data collection, which aims to explore the development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior. This work is guided by three key research questions: (1) How do children represent and reason about religious and supernatural agents? (2) How do children represent and reason about religion as an aspect of social identity? (3) How are religious and supernatural beliefs transmitted within and between generations? The protocol is designed to address these questions via a set of nine tasks for children between the ages of 4 and 10 years, a comprehensive survey completed by their parents/caregivers, and a task designed to elicit conversations between children and caregivers. This study is being conducted in 39 distinct cultural-religious groups (to date), spanning 17 countries and 13 languages. In this manuscript, we provide detailed descriptions of all elements of this study protocol, give a brief overview of the ways in which this protocol has been adapted for use in diverse religious communities, and present the final, English-language study materials for 6 of the 39 cultural-religious groups who are currently being recruited for this study: Protestant Americans, Catholic Americans, American members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans, and religiously unaffiliated Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

Visual appearance is one of the main cues children rely on when categorizing novel objects. In 3 studies, testing 128 3-year-olds and 192 5-year-olds, we investigated how various kinds of information may differentially lead children to overlook visual appearance in their categorization decisions across domains. Participants saw novel animals or artifacts of varying degrees of similarity to target categories and were asked to place them in 1 of 2 categories. Manipulated across studies was the kind of information pitted against visual similarity: internal information (Study 1, both 3- and 5-year-olds), intentional information (Study 2, both 3- and 5-year-olds), or labels (Study 3, only 5-year-olds). Overall, we found that for 5-year-olds, but not so for 3-year-olds, internal information had a stronger effect on the categorization of animals than of artifacts. Intentional information, in turn, had a stronger effect on both age groups' categorization of artifacts than of animals. Labels too had a stronger effect on 5-year-olds' categorization of artifacts than of animals. These findings are consistent with a domain-specific account of categorization, according to which the weight of different kinds of information on categorization decisions depends on children's developing understanding of domains.

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.

There are conflicting findings regarding the development of essentialist beliefs about social categories. The present studies address these findings by differentiating between the developments of the relative versus absolute essentialist status of categories. Participants were Israeli Secular Jewish and Muslim Arab kindergarteners, second graders, and sixth graders. Study 1 asked children which among alternative properties of a parent was most likely to transfer to a child. Findings showed that while kindergarteners did not systematically discriminate among properties, second and sixth graders privileged ethnicity. Study 2 asked children whether membership in various social categories was biologically or environmentally determined. Findings showed that kindergarteners and second graders, but not sixth graders, believed ethnicity to be biologically inherited. These results are discussed vis-à-vis different theories about the origins of social essentialism.

Children as young as two years of age are able to learn novel object labels through overhearing, even when distracted by an attractive toy (Akhtar, 2005). The present studies varied the information provided about novel objects and examined which elements (i.e. novel versus neutral information and labels versus facts) toddlers chose to monitor, and what type of information they were more likely to learn. In Study 1, participants learned only the novel label and the novel fact containing a novel label. In Study 2, only girls learned the novel label. Neither girls nor boys learned the novel fact. In both studies, analyses of children's gaze patterns suggest that children who learned the new information strategically oriented to the third-party conversation.

Children hold the belief that social categories have essences. We investigated what kinds of properties children feel licensed to infer about a person based on social category membership. Seventy-two 4-6-year-olds were introduced to novel social categories defined as having one internal--psychological or biological--and one external--behavioral or physical--property. For half of the participants, the internal property was described as causing the external one; for the others, no causal relationship between properties was mentioned. Children were asked to choose as a novel exemplar of a category one with only the internal or only the external property. Children inferred that exemplars had a psychological property irrespective of causal status, but they inferred the presence of a biological property only when described as causal. Children did not draw systematic inferences regarding either of the two external properties. These findings indicate that children treat psychological and causal properties as central--and perhaps essential--to human kinds.

This study examined whether infants privilege shape over other perceptual properties when making inferences about the shared properties of novel objects. Forty-six 15-month-olds were presented with novel target objects that possessed a nonobvious property, followed by test objects that varied in shape, color, or texture relative to the target. Infants generalized the nonobvious property to test objects that were highly similar in shape, but not to objects that shared the same color or texture. These results demonstrate that infants' attention to shape is not specific to lexical contexts and is present at the early stages of productive language development. The implications of these findings for debates about children's shape bias, in particular, and the nature of infants' categories more generally, are discussed. (Contains 3 figures and 4 tables.)

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.

By preschool age, children have a sophisticated assumption about the conventional nature of various kinds of information. The present studies investigated the role of two cues in 2- and 3-year-olds' determination of what is conventional, namely the intentionality and intra-individual consistency in the use of objects. Overall, in Study 1, both 2- and 3-year-olds were more likely to say that the expected use and purpose of an object was a function intentionally and consistently demonstrated. In Study 2, 3-year-olds but not 2-year-olds generalized their expectation about the conventionality of an intentionally demonstrated function to another agent's learning of the function. These findings shed light on how children's assumption of what is conventional gets refined via children's intuitive interpretive dispositions regarding human actions. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

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.

Studies indicate that children believe that positive behaviors are more likely than negative ones to remain stable across time and situations. The present study assessed whether children hold such optimism equally regarding their own vs. others' behavioral patterns. Thirty five-year-olds answered questions about the extent to which they viewed themselves as having various positively, neutrally, and negatively valued behavioral patterns. An experimenter then asked children about the extent to which behavioral patterns that children thought they had would remain stable in themselves and in others, and the extent to which behavioral patterns that they did not think they had would remain stable in others. We found that children gave higher stability ratings for positive behaviors in themselves than in others, and the opposite regarding negative behaviors. This self-protective optimism is discussed vis-a-vis the relationship between children's beliefs about traits and their behaviors and motivations.

Category learning can be achieved by identifying common features among category members, distinctive features among non-members, or both. These processes are psychologically and computationally distinct, and may have implications for the acquisition of categories at different hierarchical levels. The present study examines an account of children's difficulty in acquiring categories at the subordinate level grounded on these distinct comparison processes. Adults and children performed category learning tasks in which they were exposed either to pairs of objects from the same novel category or pairs of objects from different categories. The objects were designed so that for each category learning task, two features determined category membership whereas two other features were task irrelevant. In the learning stage participants compared pairs of objects noted to be either from the same category or from different categories. Object pairs were chosen so that the objective amount of information provided to the participants was identical in the two learning conditions. We found that when presented only with object pairs noted to be from the same category, young children (6 [less than or equal to] YO [less than or equal to] 9.5) learned the novel categories just as well as older children (10 [less than or equal to] YO [less than or equal to] 14) and adults. However, when presented only with object pairs known to be from different categories, unlike older children and adults, young children failed to learn the novel categories. We discuss cognitive and computational factors that may give rise to this comparison bias, as well as its expected outcomes. (Contains 3 tables and 6 figures.)

Creationism implies that God imbued each category with a unique nature and purpose. These implications closely correspond to what some cognitive psychologists define as an essentialistic and teleological stance towards categories. This study assessed to what extent the belief in God as creator of categories is related to the mappings of these stances to categories in different domains. Israeli secular and orthodox Jewish 1st and 5th graders responded to questions assessing these three types of beliefs. The results revealed that secular children did not differ from orthodox children with respect to their essentialist beliefs about the stability of animal category membership, and their teleological construal of artifacts. In turn, secular children did differ from orthodox children with respect to their essentialist beliefs about the stability of social category membership, and their teleological construal of both animal and social categories. These findings intimate that while essentialist beliefs about animals, and teleological beliefs about artifacts do not require cultural input in order to emerge, essentialist beliefs about social categories, and teleological beliefs about both animal and social categories do. (Contains 4 figures and 4 tables.)

When children learn the name of a novel object, they tend to extend that name to other objects similar in shape--a phenomenon referred to as the shape bias. Does the shape bias stem from learned associations between names and categories of objects, or does it derive from more general properties of children's understanding of language and the world? We argue here for the second alternative, presenting evidence that the shape bias emerges early in development, is not limited to names, and is intimately related to how children make sense of categories.

The present study investigated the roles of pattern detection capacities and understanding of intentions in children's learning of linguistic rules. We taught two-year-olds a Hebrew morphological distinction between noun and verb forms using two different training protocols. The protocols were identical in all parameters except that only in an Intentional, but not in a Control condition, were children introduced to the stimuli in an intentional communicative context. We found that children learned the morphological rule only in the Intentional condition. Thus, besides their pattern detection capacities, children's understanding of intentions substantially boosts their learning of meaningful rules.

The study investigates a social-pragmatic expectation that may motivate children to search their environment when asked for the referent of a novel label. In one experimental phase, the experimenter presented 40 two-year-olds a bucket containing a novel object and another visible object--either familiar or novel. The experimenter either asked children for the referent of a novel label, or a non-specific question. In a second experimental phase, all children saw a bucket containing a novel object, and two visible objects--one familiar and one novel. We found that, in both phases, children tended to bypass the visible novel object, preferring instead to search inside the bucket for the referent of a novel label. These findings are consistent with an expectation--dubbed the "EXPECTATION OF COMPETENCE"--that if an adult asks a child for the referent of a name, it is because the adult likely believes that the child knows that name, and thus the child can expect to be capable of finding its referent. (Contains 1 footnote.)

The present study investigated the relationships among Israeli kindergarten children's social cognitive capacities, their popularity, and their social behavior. We found that children's understanding of others' behavioral motives was positively related to their popularity, that children's false-belief understanding was positively related to peers' positive behavioral and teachers' prosocial evaluations of them, and that children's understanding of emotions was positively related to teachers' prosocial ratings but negatively related to both peers' negative behavioral and teachers' aggressiveness evaluations of them. Moreover, we found that Israeli kindergarten children value the same kinds of social behaviors in their peers as do children from other cultures. The findings substantiate the importance of assessing the implications of a variety of socio-cognitive capacities to the social functioning of young children from diverse cultures. (Contains 6 tables and 2 footnotes.)

In Study 1, 4-year-olds avoided 2 names for an object when exposed to a common or a proper noun in a puppet's presence or to a common noun in a puppet's absence, but not when exposed to a proper noun in a puppet's absence. In Study 2, 3-year-olds avoided 2 names for an object when the requester for the referent of a second label in a different language was bilingual and present during naming, but not when the speaker was bilingual but absent or monolingual. Study 3 followed up on the results of the first 2 studies. When children could assume that the puppet knew the name the experimenter used, they inferred that the puppet's use of a different name implied a different referential intent.

Mother-child interactions in 22q11.2 Deletion syndrome (22q11.2DS) and Williams syndrome (WS) were coded for maternal sensitivity/intrusiveness, child's expression of affect, levels of engagement, and dyadic reciprocity. WS children were found to express more positive emotions towards their mothers compared to 22q11.2DS children and those with developmental delay in a conflict interaction. During the same interaction, dyads of 22q11.2DS children were characterized by higher levels of maternal intrusiveness, lower levels of child's engagement and reduced reciprocity compared to dyads of typically developing children. Finally, 22q11.2DS children with the COMT Met allele showed less adaptive behaviors than children with the Val allele. Dyadic behaviors partially coincided with the distinct social phenotypes in these syndromes and are potential behavioral markers of psychopathological trajectory. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10803-015-2425-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users., Author(s): Omri Weisman[sup.1] , Ruth Feldman[sup.1] [sup.2] , Merav Burg-Malki[sup.3] [sup.4] , Miri Keren[sup.4] [sup.5] , Ronny Geva[sup.2] , Gil Diesendruck[sup.2] , Doron Gothelf[sup.3] [sup.4] Author Affiliations: (1) Yale Child [...]

Seventy-two 2-year-olds participated in a study designed to test two competing accounts of the effect of contextual change on children's ability to learn a word for an object. The mechanistic account hypothesizes that any change in context that highlights a target object will lead to word learning; the social-pragmatic account maintains that a change in context must be perceived as relevant to the speaker's communicative intentions. Consistent with the latter account, we found that children learned the word when a change in context was intentional but not when it was accidental, and children failed to learn the word for the highlighted object when a speaker naive to the preceding context named the object.

Two studies examined whether differences in the lexical explicitness with which languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish) express false belief and preschoolers' socioeconomic status (SES) influenced children's performance on standard false belief tasks. Found that lexical explicitness influenced responses on the "think" false belief question, but not the "look for" question. Children with higher SES performed better than children with low SES regardless of how false belief question was asked. (Author/KB)

Drawing on the notion of the domain-specificity of recognition, reviews evidence on the effect of language in classification of and reasoning about categories from different domains. Looks at anthropological infant classification, and preschool categorization literature. Suggests the causal nature and indicative power of animal categories seem to be the least influenced by linguistic and cultural factors, of artifact categories the most, and of human categories somewhere in between. (Author/VWL)

Investigated bilingual 6- to 10-year-olds' reasoning about the stability of human psychological characteristics in relation to the obligatory distinction between the Spanish verb forms "ser" and "estar" and the corresponding English form "to be." Found that children treated "ser" and "to be" as more likely than "estar" to convey the stability of psychological characteristics. (Author/KB)

Tested in three studies a pragmatic explanation for children's tendency to choose an unfamiliar rather than familiar object when asked to find the referent of a novel name. Found that 3-year-olds responded to requests for referent of a novel label and a novel fact the same way. Shared knowledge between speaker and listener influenced children's interpretation of speaker's request. (Author/KB)

Investigated whether Brazilian 4-year-olds held essentialist beliefs about animal categories. Found that middle class and poor children were equally likely to interpret labels as referring to mutually exclusive animal categories, and more likely to accept a common label for animals sharing internal properties than superficial properties, suggesting that internal properties convinced children that the animals were of the same kind. (Author/KB)