Gail D Heyman
Biographic Data
| ID | 186843 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gail D Heyman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gail D |
| FAMILY NAME | Heyman |
| SIGNATURE | HEYMAN G D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7764-3205 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 148 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Inter- and intra-individual flexibility in honesty default tendencies in children and adolescents
The development of the self–other distinction in perceptions of social influence
Prior research documents that adults in Western cultures perceive others as more susceptible to social influence than themselves (Pronin et al., 2007). Study 1 ( N = 318) investigated the cultural generalizability of this asymmetric perception effect by examining young adults in South Korea, where conformity is relatively valued, and a comparison sample of young adults in the United States. The results documented that, counter to theoretical acco…
Young Children's Strategic Evaluation of Others’ Work
This research examines the developmental origins of a form of partiality that can threaten the integrity of merit‐based evaluations. In each of two studies, 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children (total N = 335) rated drawings made by child artists they had never met, with the degree of identification between evaluator and artist manipulated across trials. In Study 1, ratings were systematically inflated when the evaluator and artist were identified to each o…
Children use disagreement to infer what happened
An assessment of when moral stories promote children’s honesty
Stories are widely used around the world to try to teach children moral lessons. However, it is often difficult for children to figure out how lessons from stories can be applied to real-life settings. In the present research, we tested whether encouraging children to be like the protagonists helps explain the success of positive moral stories (i.e., emphasizing positive consequence of truth-telling) in promoting honesty. Participants were 3- to …
Testing the Ability of Teachers and Students to Differentiate between Essays Generated by ChatGPT and High School Students
The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 prompted widespread concern about the implications of artificial intelligence for academic integrity, but thus far there has been little direct empirical evidence to inform this debate. Participants (69 high school teachers, 140 high school students, total N = 209 ) took an AI Identification Test in which they read pairs of essays—one written by a high school student and the other by ChatGPT—and guessed which w…
Thinking Structurally: A Cognitive Framework for Understanding How People Attribute Inequality to Structural Causes
To make accurate causal inferences about social-group inequalities, people must consider structural causes. Structural causes are a distinct type of extrinsic cause—they are stable, interconnected societal forces that systematically advantage some social groups and disadvantage others. We propose a new cognitive framework to specify how people attribute inequality to structural causes. This framework is rooted in counterfactual theories of causal…
No Heightened Musical Pitch Weighting For Tone Language Speakers in Early Childhood
Numerous studies suggest that speakers of some tone languages show advantages in musical pitch processing compared to non-tone language speakers. A recent study in adults (Jasmin et al., 2021) suggests that in addition to heightened pitch sensitivity, tone language speakers weight pitch information more strongly than other auditory cues (amplitude, duration) in both linguistic and nonlinguistic settings compared to non-tone language speakers. The…
Default settings affect children's decisions about whether to be honest
Cheating among elementary school children: A machine learning approach
Academic cheating is common, but little is known about its early emergence. It was examined among Chinese second to sixth graders (N = 2094; 53% boys, collected between 2018 and 2019) using a machine learning approach. Overall, 25.74% reported having cheated, which was predicted by the best machine learning algorithm (Random Forest) at a mean accuracy of 81.43%. Cheating was most strongly predicted by children's beliefs about the acceptability of…
Children can represent complex social status hierarchies: Evidence from Indonesia
Children's ethnicity-status associations are often studied in societies where one ethnic group possesses status across multiple dimensions, such as political influence and wealth. This study examined children's (6–12 years) and adults' representations of more complex hierarchies in Indonesia (N = 341; 38% Native Indonesian, 33% Chinese Indonesian, and 27% other ethnicities; 55% female, 36% male; 2021–2022), a society where ethnic groups hold dist…
Children acknowledge physical constraints less when actors behave stereotypically: Gender stereotypes as a case study
A fundamental part of understanding structural inequality is recognizing that constrained choices, particularly those that align with societal stereotypes, are poor indicators of a person's desires. This study examined whether children (N = 246 U.S. children, 53% female; 61% White, 24% Latinx; 5–10 years) acknowledge constraints in this way when reasoning about gender-stereotypical choices, relative to gender-neutral and gender-counterstereotypic…
The developmental origins of a default moral response: A shift from honesty to dishonesty
People are sometimes tempted to lie for their own benefit if it would not harm others. For adults, dishonesty is the default response in these circumstances. The developmental origins of this phenomenon were investigated between 2019 and 2021 among 6- to 11-year-old Han Chinese children from China (N = 548, 49% female). Children had an opportunity to win prizes in a behavioral economics game (Experiment 1) or a temptation resistance game adapted …
Messaging about descriptive and injunctive norms can promote honesty in young children
This research examined the effectiveness of using norms to promote honesty. Participants were Han Chinese children (N = 568, 50.4% male, 3.24 to 6.00 years, collected 2020–2022). Relative to children in a control condition, children in Study 1 were more likely to confess to having cheated in a game after being presented with a descriptive norm indicating that confessions are typical, or an injunctive norm indicating that most other children appro…
Overheard evaluative comments: Implications for beliefs about effort and ability
This research examined the effects of overhearing an adult praise an unseen child for not needing to work hard on an academic task. Five-year-old Han Chinese children (total N = 270 across three studies; 135 boys, collected 2020–2021) who heard this low effort praise tended to devalue effort relative to a baseline condition in which the overheard conversation lacked evaluative content. In Study 3, low effort praise increased children's endorsemen…
Parents with greater religiosity lie less to their children
The current study extends the limited body of research on the relationship between parental lying and religiosity by investigating 4 types of lies told by Singaporean parents. We found that in contrast to Chinese and American parents (Heyman, Hsu, Fu, & Lee, 2013), greater religiosity among Singaporean parents is related to less lying to children, with the exception of white lies. This pattern of findings suggests that the effect of religiosity o…
Training young children in strategic deception promotes epistemic vigilance
Learning from others allows young children to acquire vast amounts of information quickly, but doing so effectively also requires epistemic vigilance. Although preschool-age children have some capacity to engage in such processes, they often have trouble resisting information from misleading informants. The present research takes a novel strategic deception training approach to addressing this limitation. The approach is grounded in theoretical w…
Trustworthiness and Ideological Similarity (But Not Ideology) Promote Empathy
The current highly polarized U.S. political culture impedes people’s ability to live and work together effectively. Here we examine one factor that may play a role: selective empathy based on shared political ideology. Across seven studies ( N = 3,476), participants read about a hypothetical politician and his political ideology, trustworthiness, or both. Participants reported their empathy for the politician after learning he was fined (Studies …
Children’s Developing Ability to Resolve Disagreements by Integrating Perspectives
Children live in a world where disagreement is commonplace. Although disagreement can sometimes be explained by differences in people’s reliability, disagreement may also indicate that the referent elicits multiple perspectives. The present studies (total N = 129, 5- to 12-year-old ethnically diverse U.S. children, 42% girls) examined children’s ability to resolve disagreement among two individuals by identifying referents that integrated the per…
Age-related differences in implicit and explicit racial biases in Cameroonians
Age-related differences in explicit and implicit racial biases in Black Cameroonians (N = 187, 94 females) were investigated using a cross-sectional design. Participants ranged in age from 3 to 30 years, and were from middle-to-high income families in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Biases were assessed by comparing attitudes toward Blacks with those toward Whites and Chinese. Implicit pro-Black/anti-other-race (White and Chinese) biases were present at age 4…
Vocal attractiveness and voluntarily pitch-shifted voices
Children’s Intergroup Attitudes: Insights From Iran
Children generally favor individuals in their own group over others, but it is unclear which dimensions of the out-group affect this bias. This issue was investigated among 7- to 8-year-old and 11- to 12-year-old Iranian children (N = 71). Participants evaluated in-group members and three different out-groups: Iranian children from another school, Arab children, and children from the United States. Children’s evaluations closely aligned with the …
Promoting honesty through overheard conversations
In the present research, we examine the effectiveness of 1 potential mechanism: overheard conversations about the moral behavior of others. We examine this issue with reference to the important social value of honesty. Across 3 preregistered studies, preschool-age children in China (total N = 276) were presented with a version of the temptation resistance paradigm in which they were first given an opportunity to cheat by peeking at the answer in …
Differential developmental courses of implicit and explicit biases for different other-race classes
We investigated the developmental courses of both implicit and explicit racial biases in relation to the perceived social status of outgroups. We did so by assessing these biases among Chinese participants ( N = 200, age range from 4- to 19-year-olds) toward 2 different other-race groups that differ in terms of perceived social status (i.e., Whites and Blacks). At the youngest age, children showed both implicit anti-White and anti-Black bias at s…
Modesty can promote trust: Evidence from China
When people let others know about their accomplishments, they can improve their social standing, but doing so may also have a cost, especially within social environments in which there is great emphasis on the value of modesty. One particular downside of self‐promotion, the risk of being seen as untrustworthy, was examined among children in China. Across three studies, children ranging in age from 7 to 11 years (total N = 251) judged the trustwor…
Young children use motive information to make trait inferences
The present study investigates children's capacity to understand traits in a psychologically meaningful way. Participants included 18 individuals in each of 4 age groups: kindergarten (ages 5-6), 2nd grade (ages 7-8), 5th grade (ages 10-11), and adult. They heard a series of 6 short stories in which a main character performs an action based on a particular motive (positive, negative, or incidental) that results in either a positive or a negative …
Children's Evaluation of Sources of Information About Traits
Children's assessment of the value of different sources of information about psychological traits was investigated among 6- to 7-year-olds and 10- to 11-year-olds across 5 studies (N = 330). Older children were more likely than younger children to reject self-report as a source of information about the highly evaluative traits smart and honest, but no such age-related difference was seen for the less evaluative comparison traits outgoing and nerv…
Reasoning about the disclosure of success and failure to friends among children in the United States and China
Children's reasoning about individuals' willingness to disclose their successes and failures was investigated among 194 6- to 11-year-olds in the United States and China. In Study 1, participants showed a valence-matching effect, in which they predicted that individuals would be more likely to disclose their performance to an audience of friends if the friends' level of achievement was similar rather than dissimilar. This effect was weaker among …
Children's Beliefs About Gender Differences in the Academic and Social Domains
Seeing the other side
Collaboration promotes proportional reasoning about resource distribution in young children
The authors investigated how children and adults evaluate the "niceness" of individuals who engage in resource distribution, with a focus on their sensitivity to the proportion of resources given. Across 3 experiments, subjects evaluated the niceness of a child who gave a quantity of pennies to another child. In Study 1 (N = 30), adults showed sensitivity to the proportion given, whereas 5- and 7-year-old children did not. In Study 2 (N = 74), bo…
Children's Reasoning about Lie‐telling and Truth‐telling in Politeness Contexts
Children's reasoning about lying and truth-telling was examined among participants ages 7-11 (total N = 181) with reference to conflicts between being honest and protecting the feelings of others. In Study 1, participants showed different patterns of evaluation and motivational inference in politeness contexts vs. transgression contexts: in politeness contexts, they rated lie-telling more favorably and were far more likely to assume that motives …
Perceptual individuation training (but not mere exposure) reduces implicit racial bias in preschool children
Two studies with preschool-age children examined the effectiveness of perceptual individuation training at reducing racial bias (Study 1, N = 32; Study 2, N = 56). We found that training preschool-age children to individuate other-race faces resulted in a reduction in implicit racial bias while mere exposure to other-race faces produced no such effect. We also showed that neither individuation training nor mere exposure reduced explicit racial bi…
Beliefs about the origins of human psychological traits
The development of children's reasoning about the origins of human psychological traits was investigated across 4 studies with a total of 316 participants ranging in age from kindergartners to 5th graders and adults. The primary methodology was a switched-at-birth task (L. A. Hirschfeld, 1995), which poses a hypothetical nature-nurture conflict. Two major issues were addressed: (a) the extent to which psychological traits are viewed as a product …
Selective trust: Children's use of intention and outcome of past testimony
Children's epistemic vigilance was examined for their reasoning about the intentions and outcomes of informants' past testimony. In a 2 × 2 factorial design, 5- and 6-year-olds witnessed informants offering advice based on the intent to help or deceive others about the location of hidden prizes, with the advice leading to positive or negative outcomes. Informants then suggested to the children where to search for hidden prizes. Children trusted i…
Children's moral evaluations of reporting the transgressions of peers: Age differences in evaluations of tattling
The way children evaluate the reporting of peers' transgressions to authority figures was investigated. Participants, ages 6-11 years (N = 60), were presented with a series of vignettes, each of which depicted a child who committed either a minor transgression (such as not finishing the vegetables at lunch) or a more serious transgression (such as stealing from a classmate). Participants were asked to evaluate the decision of a child observer who…
Preschoolers' Ability to Make Dispositional Predictions Within and Across Domain
Although children over eight years of age appear to view others in dispositional terms, findings for children of kindergarten age are mixed. Few studies have examined dispositional thinking in children younger than kindergarteners. The present studies addressed two questions about trait conceptions in 4‐ and 5‐year‐old preschoolers'. (1). Do children of this age use past behaviors to predict future behavior si (2) Do they show evidence of global …
Preschoolers’ Beliefs About the Stability of Antisocial Behavior: Implications for Navigating Social Challenges
The relation between 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children's beliefs about sociomoral stability (the tendency for antisocial behavior to remain stable over time) and their reasoning about peer interactions was examined. Participants were 100 preschoolers enrolled in a Head Start program. Children who endorsed sociomoral stability beliefs were less likely than their peers to make prosocial inferences, were rated by their teachers as less likely to engage in p…
The Spanish ser/estar distinction in bilingual children's reasoning about human psychological characteristics
Children's reasoning about the stability of human psychological characteristics was investigated in relation to the obligatory distinction between the Spanish verb forms ser and estar (which convey different information about the stability of characteristics) and the corresponding English form to be. Participants (85 bilingual children, ages 6 to 10 years) were interviewed to determine (a) whether the ser/estar distinction is relevant to reasonin…
Differential developmental courses of implicit and explicit biases for different other-race classes
We investigated the developmental courses of both implicit and explicit racial biases in relation to the perceived social status of outgroups. We did so by assessing these biases among Chinese participants ( N = 200, age range from 4- to 19-year-olds) toward 2 different other-race groups that differ in terms of perceived social status (i.e., Whites and Blacks). At the youngest age, children showed both implicit anti-White and anti-Black bias at s…
Japanese and American children’s moral evaluations of reporting on transgressions
American and Japanese children's evaluations of the reporting of peers' transgressions to authority figures were investigated. Seven-, 9-, and 11-year-old children (N = 160) and adults (N = 62) were presented with vignettes and were asked to evaluate the decisions of child observers who reported their friend's either major or relatively minor transgression to a teacher. The results showed that, in both countries, participants across all age group…
Japanese and American Children's Reasoning about Accepting Credit for Prosocial Behavior
Children's reasoning about the appropriateness of accepting credit for one's own prosocial behavior was examined. Participants aged 7 to 11 years old in Japan and the United States (total N = 206) were presented with a series of stories in which a protagonist performs a good deed and is asked about it by another character. Across stories, the protagonist either truthfully acknowledges the deed or falsely denies it, in a statement that is made eit…
Modesty can promote trust: Evidence from China
When people let others know about their accomplishments, they can improve their social standing, but doing so may also have a cost, especially within social environments in which there is great emphasis on the value of modesty. One particular downside of self‐promotion, the risk of being seen as untrustworthy, was examined among children in China. Across three studies, children ranging in age from 7 to 11 years (total N = 251) judged the trustwor…
Selective skepticism: American and Chinese children's reasoning about evaluative academic feedback
Children's reasoning about the credibility of positive and negative evaluations of academic performance was examined. Across 2 studies, 7- and 10-year-olds from the United States and China (N = 334) judged the credibility of academic evaluations that were directed toward an unfamiliar peer. In Study 1, participants from China responded that criticism should be accepted to a greater extent than did participants from the United States, and children…
Children’s Interpretation of Ambiguous Behavior: Evidence for a ‘Boys are Bad’ Bias
Possible gender‐related evaluative biases were investigated among a group of 64 second and third graders (ages 6 y 11 m to 9 y 7 m). Participants were shown photographs of 8 unfamiliar children, and were told that each had performed a particular behavior. Each of the behaviors was consistent with multiple interpretations, including a positive interpretation and a negative interpretation. When the unfamiliar peers were male, participants were more…
Training young children in strategic deception promotes epistemic vigilance
Learning from others allows young children to acquire vast amounts of information quickly, but doing so effectively also requires epistemic vigilance. Although preschool-age children have some capacity to engage in such processes, they often have trouble resisting information from misleading informants. The present research takes a novel strategic deception training approach to addressing this limitation. The approach is grounded in theoretical w…
Promoting honesty through overheard conversations
In the present research, we examine the effectiveness of 1 potential mechanism: overheard conversations about the moral behavior of others. We examine this issue with reference to the important social value of honesty. Across 3 preregistered studies, preschool-age children in China (total N = 276) were presented with a version of the temptation resistance paradigm in which they were first given an opportunity to cheat by peeking at the answer in …
When the Majority Becomes the Minority: A Longitudinal Study of the Effects of Immersive Experience With Racial Out-Group Members on Implicit and Explicit Racial Biases
The present study investigated the effects of immersive exposure to other-race individuals on racial bias. In Study 1, we tracked African students ( N = 85) who went to study at a Chinese university and thus experienced daily contact with Chinese individuals en masse for the first time. Using a cohort-sequential longitudinal design, we found that an implicit pro-Chinese racial bias emerged within 3 months after these students arrived in China, an…
Children's Evaluation of Other People's Self‐Descriptions
Children's evaluations of what people communicate about themselves were examined in three studies with a total of 296 participants (aged four to 12). Participants heard scenarios in which characters' motivations to reveal truthful information were systematically manipulated to examine (1) children's understanding that people do not always reveal true information, and (2) children's use of contextual cues to judge the credibility of what individua…
Preschoolers' Ability to Make Dispositional Predictions Within and Across Domain
Although children over eight years of age appear to view others in dispositional terms, findings for children of kindergarten age are mixed. Few studies have examined dispositional thinking in children younger than kindergarteners. The present studies addressed two questions about trait conceptions in 4‐ and 5‐year‐old preschoolers'. (1). Do children of this age use past behaviors to predict future behavior si (2) Do they show evidence of global …
Preschoolers' Ability to Make Dispositional Predictions Within and Across Domains
Young children use motive information to make trait inferences
The present study investigates children's capacity to understand traits in a psychologically meaningful way. Participants included 18 individuals in each of 4 age groups: kindergarten (ages 5-6), 2nd grade (ages 7-8), 5th grade (ages 10-11), and adult. They heard a series of 6 short stories in which a main character performs an action based on a particular motive (positive, negative, or incidental) that results in either a positive or a negative …
Carrot-Eaters and Creature-Believers: The Effects of Lexicalization on Children's Inferences About Social Categories
This article examines how language affects children's inferences about novel social categories. We hypothesized that lexicalization (using a noun label to refer to someone who possesses a certain property) would influence children's inferences about other people. Specifically, we hypothesized that when a property is lexicalized, it is thought to be more stable over time and over contexts. One hundred fifteen children (5- and 7-year-olds) learned …
Beliefs about the origins of human psychological traits
The development of children's reasoning about the origins of human psychological traits was investigated across 4 studies with a total of 316 participants ranging in age from kindergartners to 5th graders and adults. The primary methodology was a switched-at-birth task (L. A. Hirschfeld, 1995), which poses a hypothetical nature-nurture conflict. Two major issues were addressed: (a) the extent to which psychological traits are viewed as a product …
Children’s Interpretation of Ambiguous Behavior: Evidence for a ‘Boys are Bad’ Bias
Possible gender‐related evaluative biases were investigated among a group of 64 second and third graders (ages 6 y 11 m to 9 y 7 m). Participants were shown photographs of 8 unfamiliar children, and were told that each had performed a particular behavior. Each of the behaviors was consistent with multiple interpretations, including a positive interpretation and a negative interpretation. When the unfamiliar peers were male, participants were more…
The Spanish ser/estar distinction in bilingual children's reasoning about human psychological characteristics
Children's reasoning about the stability of human psychological characteristics was investigated in relation to the obligatory distinction between the Spanish verb forms ser and estar (which convey different information about the stability of characteristics) and the corresponding English form to be. Participants (85 bilingual children, ages 6 to 10 years) were interviewed to determine (a) whether the ser/estar distinction is relevant to reasonin…
Preschoolers’ Beliefs About the Stability of Antisocial Behavior: Implications for Navigating Social Challenges
The relation between 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children's beliefs about sociomoral stability (the tendency for antisocial behavior to remain stable over time) and their reasoning about peer interactions was examined. Participants were 100 preschoolers enrolled in a Head Start program. Children who endorsed sociomoral stability beliefs were less likely than their peers to make prosocial inferences, were rated by their teachers as less likely to engage in p…
Children's Beliefs About Gender Differences in the Academic and Social Domains
Preschoolers use trait-relevant information to evaluate the appropriateness of an aggressive response
The tendency for 3- to 5-year-old children to use trait-relevant information about other people when evaluating aggressive responses to ambiguous behavior was examined across two studies (N = 81). Children were more likely to endorse the use of aggression against a "mean" versus a "nice" story character. Additionally, they were more likely to endorse the use of aggression against a story character who feels happy rather than sad when bad things h…
Children's Evaluation of Sources of Information About Traits
Children's assessment of the value of different sources of information about psychological traits was investigated among 6- to 7-year-olds and 10- to 11-year-olds across 5 studies (N = 330). Older children were more likely than younger children to reject self-report as a source of information about the highly evaluative traits smart and honest, but no such age-related difference was seen for the less evaluative comparison traits outgoing and nerv…
Children's Evaluation of Other People's Self‐Descriptions
Children's evaluations of what people communicate about themselves were examined in three studies with a total of 296 participants (aged four to 12). Participants heard scenarios in which characters' motivations to reveal truthful information were systematically manipulated to examine (1) children's understanding that people do not always reveal true information, and (2) children's use of contextual cues to judge the credibility of what individua…
Children's Reasoning about Lie‐telling and Truth‐telling in Politeness Contexts
Children's reasoning about lying and truth-telling was examined among participants ages 7-11 (total N = 181) with reference to conflicts between being honest and protecting the feelings of others. In Study 1, participants showed different patterns of evaluation and motivational inference in politeness contexts vs. transgression contexts: in politeness contexts, they rated lie-telling more favorably and were far more likely to assume that motives …
Reasoning about the disclosure of success and failure to friends among children in the United States and China
Children's reasoning about individuals' willingness to disclose their successes and failures was investigated among 194 6- to 11-year-olds in the United States and China. In Study 1, participants showed a valence-matching effect, in which they predicted that individuals would be more likely to disclose their performance to an audience of friends if the friends' level of achievement was similar rather than dissimilar. This effect was weaker among …
Japanese and American Children's Reasoning about Accepting Credit for Prosocial Behavior
Children's reasoning about the appropriateness of accepting credit for one's own prosocial behavior was examined. Participants aged 7 to 11 years old in Japan and the United States (total N = 206) were presented with a series of stories in which a protagonist performs a good deed and is asked about it by another character. Across stories, the protagonist either truthfully acknowledges the deed or falsely denies it, in a statement that is made eit…
Collaboration promotes proportional reasoning about resource distribution in young children
The authors investigated how children and adults evaluate the "niceness" of individuals who engage in resource distribution, with a focus on their sensitivity to the proportion of resources given. Across 3 experiments, subjects evaluated the niceness of a child who gave a quantity of pennies to another child. In Study 1 (N = 30), adults showed sensitivity to the proportion given, whereas 5- and 7-year-old children did not. In Study 2 (N = 74), bo…
Children's moral evaluations of reporting the transgressions of peers: Age differences in evaluations of tattling
The way children evaluate the reporting of peers' transgressions to authority figures was investigated. Participants, ages 6-11 years (N = 60), were presented with a series of vignettes, each of which depicted a child who committed either a minor transgression (such as not finishing the vegetables at lunch) or a more serious transgression (such as stealing from a classmate). Participants were asked to evaluate the decision of a child observer who…
Selective skepticism: American and Chinese children's reasoning about evaluative academic feedback
Children's reasoning about the credibility of positive and negative evaluations of academic performance was examined. Across 2 studies, 7- and 10-year-olds from the United States and China (N = 334) judged the credibility of academic evaluations that were directed toward an unfamiliar peer. In Study 1, participants from China responded that criticism should be accepted to a greater extent than did participants from the United States, and children…
Selective trust: Children's use of intention and outcome of past testimony
Children's epistemic vigilance was examined for their reasoning about the intentions and outcomes of informants' past testimony. In a 2 × 2 factorial design, 5- and 6-year-olds witnessed informants offering advice based on the intent to help or deceive others about the location of hidden prizes, with the advice leading to positive or negative outcomes. Informants then suggested to the children where to search for hidden prizes. Children trusted i…
Children's Beliefs About Self‐disclosure to Friends Regarding Academic Achievement
Self‐disclosure to friends is a potentially useful way for children to pursue a range of desired goals. Here we examined reasoning about the appropriateness of disclosing one's own academic outcomes in a sample of 7‐, 9‐, 11‐, 13‐, and 15‐year‐old C hinese participants ( N = 150). The valence of (1) the outcomes to be disclosed and (2) the corresponding outcomes for the potential audience for the disclosure was manipulated factorially, and partic…
Japanese and American children’s moral evaluations of reporting on transgressions
American and Japanese children's evaluations of the reporting of peers' transgressions to authority figures were investigated. Seven-, 9-, and 11-year-old children (N = 160) and adults (N = 62) were presented with vignettes and were asked to evaluate the decisions of child observers who reported their friend's either major or relatively minor transgression to a teacher. The results showed that, in both countries, participants across all age group…
Seeing the other side
Perceptual individuation training (but not mere exposure) reduces implicit racial bias in preschool children
Two studies with preschool-age children examined the effectiveness of perceptual individuation training at reducing racial bias (Study 1, N = 32; Study 2, N = 56). We found that training preschool-age children to individuate other-race faces resulted in a reduction in implicit racial bias while mere exposure to other-race faces produced no such effect. We also showed that neither individuation training nor mere exposure reduced explicit racial bi…
When the Majority Becomes the Minority: A Longitudinal Study of the Effects of Immersive Experience With Racial Out-Group Members on Implicit and Explicit Racial Biases
The present study investigated the effects of immersive exposure to other-race individuals on racial bias. In Study 1, we tracked African students ( N = 85) who went to study at a Chinese university and thus experienced daily contact with Chinese individuals en masse for the first time. Using a cohort-sequential longitudinal design, we found that an implicit pro-Chinese racial bias emerged within 3 months after these students arrived in China, an…
Modesty can promote trust: Evidence from China
When people let others know about their accomplishments, they can improve their social standing, but doing so may also have a cost, especially within social environments in which there is great emphasis on the value of modesty. One particular downside of self‐promotion, the risk of being seen as untrustworthy, was examined among children in China. Across three studies, children ranging in age from 7 to 11 years (total N = 251) judged the trustwor…
Psychology (48 works) · Social Psychology (44 works) · Developmental psychology (39 works) · Social Psychology (30 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (24 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (24 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (10 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (8 works) · Cognitive psychology (7 works) · Early Childhood Education and Development (7 works)