Gil Diesendruck
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 229630 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Gil Diesendruck |
| PRENOMES | Gil |
| SOBRENOME | Diesendruck |
| ASSINATURA | DIESENDRUCK G |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Bar-Ilan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1352-7173 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 31 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 123 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 31 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1997 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Intergroup bias in children’s preference for in- versus out-group informants
The present research explored whether children manifest intergroup biases in their choice of informants from in- versus out-groups. We conducted two studies among Israeli Jewish and Arab children aged 5- and 8-year-old ( N = 260; 51% girls, 49% boys). Study 1 served as a baseline with nonsocial targets of information, whereas Study 2 had people as targets. We examined biases in three respects: assessment of informants' expertise, preference for i…
Exploring the Out-Group Homogeneity Effect Among Arab Children in Israel
The out-group homogeneity effect has been found to contribute to adults' inter-group biases. Three studies examined whether 5- and 8-year-old Arab (i.e., minority) children in Israel also manifest this effect (March 2017–January 2020). Arab children from different religious affiliations and social environments (N = 272, 54% females) were asked to choose either a homogeneous or a heterogeneous sample of group members to infer if a given property (…
Priming group identities affects children's resource distribution among groups
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, childre…
Infants' biased individuation of in-group members
Children’s biased preference for information about in- and out-groups
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 informatio…
Children Hold Leaders Primarily Responsible, Not Entitled
Do children construe leaders as individuals whose position of power entails primarily more responsibility or more entitlement, compared with nonleaders? To address this question, 5-year-old children (n = 128) heard a story involving a hierarchical dyad (a leader and a nonleader) and an egalitarian dyad (two nonleaders), and then assessed protagonists’ relative contributions to a collaborative endeavor (Experiments 1 and 2) or relative withdrawals…
Promoting positive intergroup attitudes using persona dolls
This study evaluated the effectiveness of a vicarious contact intervention program for improving knowledge and attitudes of Jewish-Israeli secular and religious children regarding their ingroup and three outgroups: secular/religious Jews, Ethiopian-descendant Jews, and Arabs. One hundred and nine kindergartners participated in a four-week intervention, in which experimenters introduced to them four persona dolls representing the different groups.…
The Development of a Scarcity Bias
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…
Children explain in‐ and out‐group behavior differently
Adults manifest a number of attributional biases in explaining the behavior of in‐ versus out‐group members. The present study investigated the developmental origins of such biased explanation. Children from majority and minority populations in Israel, and from majority populations in Germany ( N = 165), were asked to explain the behavior of in‐ and out‐group members. Across ages and groups, children more often referred to group membership when e…
What children want to know about in‐ and out‐groups, and how knowledge affects their intergroup attitudes
One of the key factors contributing to the development of negative attitudes toward out‐groups is lack of knowledge about them. The present study investigated what type of information 3‐ to 4‐ and 5‐ to 6‐ year‐old Jewish Israeli children ( N = 82) are interested in acquiring about unfamiliar in‐ and out‐group individuals, and how providing children with the requested information affects their intergroup attitudes. Children were shown pictures of…
Cultural differences in the development of a preference for scarce objects
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 Taiw…
Collaborative and competitive motivations uniquely impact infants' racial categorization
Parochialism in preschool boys' resource allocation
The evolution of intergroup bias
Domain differences in the weights of perceptual and conceptual information in children’s categorization
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 …
Is Religion Essential? Beliefs about Religious Categories
The purpose of the present study was to assess whether presumed variations in people’s values towards intergroup mobility modulate their essentialist beliefs about the groups. Our target population was orthodox Jews, who, on the one hand, value in-group preservation regarding religious affiliation (Jewish or Christian), but on the other, value uni-directional integration regarding religiosity (from secular to orthodox). This population was compar…
My kingdom for a horse
Promising and warning are speech acts that have to be credible to be persuasive. The question is: When does a promise become incredible and a warning unpersuasive? Whereas credibility has been researched from a social persuasion perspective, this article answers that question empirically, from an adaptive heuristics perspective. First, we present a satisficing algorithm that discriminates conditional promises, threats, advices, and warnings by pr…
Orienting to third-party conversations
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 n…
The evolution of intergroup bias
Social psychologists have learned a great deal about the nature of intergroup conflict and the attitudinal and cognitive processes that enable it. Less is known about where these processes come from in the first place. In particular, do our strategies for dealing with other groups emerge in the absence of human-specific experiences? One profitable way to answer this question has involved administering tests that are conceptual equivalents of thos…
Seeing isn't believing
Adults and children seem to essentialize certain social categories. Three studies investigated whether, and how, exposure to ethnic diversity affects this bias. Participants were 516 kindergarten, 2nd grade, and 6th grade Israeli Jewish and Arab children attending regular (mono-cultural) or integrated schools. Study 1 revealed that exposure increased the salience of ethnicity, especially for Jewish children. Study 2 showed no differences among gr…
Celebrity Contagion and the Value of Objects
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
Intentions help children learn meaningful rules
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 c…
Self‐protective Optimism
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 experi…
Young children's expectation of competence in word learning
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, …
The Principles of Conventionality and Contrast in Word Learning
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 m…
Celebrity Contagion and the Value of Objects
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
Children's avoidance of lexical overlap
Children tend to choose an unfamiliar object rather than a familiar one when asked to find the referent of a novel name. This response has been taken as evidence for the operation of certain lexical constraints in children's inferences of word meanings. The present studies test an alternative--pragmatic--explanation of this phenomenon among 3-year-olds. In Study 1 children responded to a request for the referent of a novel label in the same way t…
Essentialism in Brazilian children's extensions of animal names
The present study investigates whether Brazilian children have essentialist beliefs about animal categories. Two groups of Brazilian 4-year-olds (middle class and from shantytowns) were told that 2 animals share either internal or superficial properties. They were then taught labels for the animals. Across conditions, children from both groups were equally likely to interpret the labels as referring to mutually exclusive categories of animals, bu…
The Principles of Conventionality and Contrast in Word Learning
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 m…
Conceptual and linguistic biases in children's word learning
Four studies examined the influence of essentialist information and perceptual similarity on preschoolers' interpretations of labels. In Study 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were less likely to interpret 2 labels for animals as referring to mutually exclusive categories: when the animals were said to share internal, rather than superficial, properties and when the animals were perceptually similar rather than dissimilar. In Study 2, neither internal …
Seeing isn't believing
Adults and children seem to essentialize certain social categories. Three studies investigated whether, and how, exposure to ethnic diversity affects this bias. Participants were 516 kindergarten, 2nd grade, and 6th grade Israeli Jewish and Arab children attending regular (mono-cultural) or integrated schools. Study 1 revealed that exposure increased the salience of ethnicity, especially for Jewish children. Study 2 showed no differences among gr…
The influence of language and socioeconomic status on children's understanding of false belief
Study 1 investigated whether differences in the lexical explicitness with which languages express false belief influence children's performance on standard false belief tasks. Preschoolers speaking languages with explicit terms (Turkish and Puerto Rican Spanish) were compared with preschoolers speaking languages without explicit terms (Brazilian Portuguese and English) on questions assessing false belief understanding either specifically (the thi…
The evolution of intergroup bias
Social psychologists have learned a great deal about the nature of intergroup conflict and the attitudinal and cognitive processes that enable it. Less is known about where these processes come from in the first place. In particular, do our strategies for dealing with other groups emerge in the absence of human-specific experiences? One profitable way to answer this question has involved administering tests that are conceptual equivalents of thos…
Promoting positive intergroup attitudes using persona dolls
This study evaluated the effectiveness of a vicarious contact intervention program for improving knowledge and attitudes of Jewish-Israeli secular and religious children regarding their ingroup and three outgroups: secular/religious Jews, Ethiopian-descendant Jews, and Arabs. One hundred and nine kindergartners participated in a four-week intervention, in which experimenters introduced to them four persona dolls representing the different groups.…
Children’s biased preference for information about in- and out-groups
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 informatio…
What children want to know about in‐ and out‐groups, and how knowledge affects their intergroup attitudes
One of the key factors contributing to the development of negative attitudes toward out‐groups is lack of knowledge about them. The present study investigated what type of information 3‐ to 4‐ and 5‐ to 6‐ year‐old Jewish Israeli children ( N = 82) are interested in acquiring about unfamiliar in‐ and out‐group individuals, and how providing children with the requested information affects their intergroup attitudes. Children were shown pictures of…
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…
Exploring the Out-Group Homogeneity Effect Among Arab Children in Israel
The out-group homogeneity effect has been found to contribute to adults' inter-group biases. Three studies examined whether 5- and 8-year-old Arab (i.e., minority) children in Israel also manifest this effect (March 2017–January 2020). Arab children from different religious affiliations and social environments (N = 272, 54% females) were asked to choose either a homogeneous or a heterogeneous sample of group members to infer if a given property (…
Children explain in‐ and out‐group behavior differently
Adults manifest a number of attributional biases in explaining the behavior of in‐ versus out‐group members. The present study investigated the developmental origins of such biased explanation. Children from majority and minority populations in Israel, and from majority populations in Germany ( N = 165), were asked to explain the behavior of in‐ and out‐group members. Across ages and groups, children more often referred to group membership when e…
Cultural differences in the development of a preference for scarce objects
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 Taiw…
The evolution of intergroup bias
Self‐protective Optimism
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 experi…
The effect of perceptual similarity and linguistic input on children's acquisition of object labels
This study investigated whether and when children establish various semantic relations between old and new words. Fifty two-year-olds were taught labels for objects previously referred to by an overextended term. We found that children were more likely to learn a new label when ( a ) it referred to a new object that was perceptually dissimilar, rather than similar, to a known one, and ( b ) when linguistic information indicated it had an inclusio…
Conceptual and linguistic biases in children's word learning
Four studies examined the influence of essentialist information and perceptual similarity on preschoolers' interpretations of labels. In Study 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were less likely to interpret 2 labels for animals as referring to mutually exclusive categories: when the animals were said to share internal, rather than superficial, properties and when the animals were perceptually similar rather than dissimilar. In Study 2, neither internal …
Essentialism in Brazilian children's extensions of animal names
The present study investigates whether Brazilian children have essentialist beliefs about animal categories. Two groups of Brazilian 4-year-olds (middle class and from shantytowns) were told that 2 animals share either internal or superficial properties. They were then taught labels for the animals. Across conditions, children from both groups were equally likely to interpret the labels as referring to mutually exclusive categories of animals, bu…
Children's avoidance of lexical overlap
Children tend to choose an unfamiliar object rather than a familiar one when asked to find the referent of a novel name. This response has been taken as evidence for the operation of certain lexical constraints in children's inferences of word meanings. The present studies test an alternative--pragmatic--explanation of this phenomenon among 3-year-olds. In Study 1 children responded to a request for the referent of a novel label in the same way t…
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…
The influence of language and socioeconomic status on children's understanding of false belief
Study 1 investigated whether differences in the lexical explicitness with which languages express false belief influence children's performance on standard false belief tasks. Preschoolers speaking languages with explicit terms (Turkish and Puerto Rican Spanish) were compared with preschoolers speaking languages without explicit terms (Brazilian Portuguese and English) on questions assessing false belief understanding either specifically (the thi…
The Principles of Conventionality and Contrast in Word Learning
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 m…
Young children's expectation of competence in word learning
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, …
Intentions help children learn meaningful rules
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 c…
Self‐protective Optimism
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 experi…
My kingdom for a horse
Promising and warning are speech acts that have to be credible to be persuasive. The question is: When does a promise become incredible and a warning unpersuasive? Whereas credibility has been researched from a social persuasion perspective, this article answers that question empirically, from an adaptive heuristics perspective. First, we present a satisficing algorithm that discriminates conditional promises, threats, advices, and warnings by pr…
Orienting to third-party conversations
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 n…
The evolution of intergroup bias
Social psychologists have learned a great deal about the nature of intergroup conflict and the attitudinal and cognitive processes that enable it. Less is known about where these processes come from in the first place. In particular, do our strategies for dealing with other groups emerge in the absence of human-specific experiences? One profitable way to answer this question has involved administering tests that are conceptual equivalents of thos…
Seeing isn't believing
Adults and children seem to essentialize certain social categories. Three studies investigated whether, and how, exposure to ethnic diversity affects this bias. Participants were 516 kindergarten, 2nd grade, and 6th grade Israeli Jewish and Arab children attending regular (mono-cultural) or integrated schools. Study 1 revealed that exposure increased the salience of ethnicity, especially for Jewish children. Study 2 showed no differences among gr…
Celebrity Contagion and the Value of Objects
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
Is Religion Essential? Beliefs about Religious Categories
The purpose of the present study was to assess whether presumed variations in people’s values towards intergroup mobility modulate their essentialist beliefs about the groups. Our target population was orthodox Jews, who, on the one hand, value in-group preservation regarding religious affiliation (Jewish or Christian), but on the other, value uni-directional integration regarding religiosity (from secular to orthodox). This population was compar…
Domain differences in the weights of perceptual and conceptual information in children’s categorization
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 …
The evolution of intergroup bias
Parochialism in preschool boys' resource allocation
Collaborative and competitive motivations uniquely impact infants' racial categorization
What children want to know about in‐ and out‐groups, and how knowledge affects their intergroup attitudes
One of the key factors contributing to the development of negative attitudes toward out‐groups is lack of knowledge about them. The present study investigated what type of information 3‐ to 4‐ and 5‐ to 6‐ year‐old Jewish Israeli children ( N = 82) are interested in acquiring about unfamiliar in‐ and out‐group individuals, and how providing children with the requested information affects their intergroup attitudes. Children were shown pictures of…
Cultural differences in the development of a preference for scarce objects
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 Taiw…
The Development of a Scarcity Bias
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…
Children explain in‐ and out‐group behavior differently
Adults manifest a number of attributional biases in explaining the behavior of in‐ versus out‐group members. The present study investigated the developmental origins of such biased explanation. Children from majority and minority populations in Israel, and from majority populations in Germany ( N = 165), were asked to explain the behavior of in‐ and out‐group members. Across ages and groups, children more often referred to group membership when e…
Children Hold Leaders Primarily Responsible, Not Entitled
Do children construe leaders as individuals whose position of power entails primarily more responsibility or more entitlement, compared with nonleaders? To address this question, 5-year-old children (n = 128) heard a story involving a hierarchical dyad (a leader and a nonleader) and an egalitarian dyad (two nonleaders), and then assessed protagonists’ relative contributions to a collaborative endeavor (Experiments 1 and 2) or relative withdrawals…
Psychology (29 obras) · Social Psychology (25 obras) · Developmental psychology (24 obras) · Child and Animal Learning Development (16 obras) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (15 obras) · Social Psychology (13 obras) · Cognitive psychology (12 obras) · Cultural Differences and Values (10 obras) · Linguistics (9 obras) · Cognition (6 obras)