Lindsey J Powell

Biographic Data

ID3774024
NAMELindsey J Powell
GIVEN NAMESLindsey J
FAMILY NAMEPowell
SIGNATUREPOWELL L J
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of California San Diego
ORCID0000-0001-5142-5998
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS6
TOTAL CITATIONS6
WORKS AS AUTHOR6
WORKS AS EDITOR0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2002
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX1

  • Infants' Expectations for Helping in Imitators

    Open AccessBill Pepe, Lindsey J PowellARTICLEInfancy2025

    Human infants seem to make positive social inferences about individuals who imitate others. In three preregistered experiments we test if these inferences include an expectation that imitators will be helpful, and also ask if the inferences infants make are about imitators' dispositions or primarily about their relationships. In each experiment 8‐ to 9‐month‐old infants saw one individual imitate, and another individual not imitate, the same targ…

  • Children's Evaluations of Empathizers

    Open AccessAlexis S Smith-Flores, Gabriel J Bonamy et al.ARTICLEChild Development2025References: 49

    Children's evaluations of empathizers were examined using vignette-based tasks (N = 159 4- to 7-year-old U.S. children, 82 girls, 52% White) between March 2023 and March 2024. Children typically evaluated empathizers positively compared to less empathic others. They rated empathic responses as more appropriate, selected empathizers as nicer, and inferred more positive relationships between empathizers and the targets of empathy. However, when emp…

  • Children’s Reasoning About Empathy and Social Relationships

    Open AccessAlexis S Smith-Flores, Gabriel J Bonamy et al.ARTICLEOpen MIND2023

    Across the lifespan, empathic and counter-empathic emotions are shaped by social relationships. Here we test the hypothesis that this connection is encoded in children’s intuitive theory of psychology, allowing them to predict when others will feel empathy versus counter-empathy and to use vicarious emotion information to infer relationships. We asked 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 79) to make emotion predictions or relationship inferences in res…

  • Interpersonal utility and children's social inferences from shared preferences

    Open AccessMadison L Pesowski, Lindsey J Powell et al.ARTICLECognition2023

    Similarity of behaviors or attributes is often used to infer social affiliation and prosociality. Does this reflect reasoning using a simple expectation of homophily, or more complex reasoning about shared utility? We addressed this question by examining the inferences children make from similar choices when this similarity does or does not cause competition over a zero-sum resource. Four- to six-year-olds (N = 204) saw two vignettes, each featur…

  • Adopted Utility Calculus

    Open AccessLindsey J PowellARTICLEPerspectives on Psychological…2022

    To successfully navigate their social world, humans need to understand and map enduring relationships between people: Humans need a concept of social affiliation. Here I propose that the initial concept of social affiliation, available in infancy, is based on the extent to which one individual consistently takes on the goals and needs of another. This proposal grounds affiliation in intuitive psychology, as formalized in the naive-utility-calculu…

  • Offensive Travel Documentaries on Japanese Television

    Lindsey Powell, Lindsey J PowellARTICLEVisual Anthropology2002Cited by: 6

    Japanese television networks regularly broadcast a number of popular travel programs that present a highly problematic, ethnocentric, and racist worldview. Especially troubling is the fact that this genre reinforces a notion of Japanese superiority in relation to so-called "naked tribes." The "primitives" are brought to Japan, bathed, clothed, given a few yen, and sent to the mall to learn how to be modern consumers. This article briefly explores…