This three-armed randomized controlled trial examined how moral disengagement and social norms account for change in bullying behavior and their potential as targets of anti-bullying components within separate interventions among 1200 French-speaking Belgian elementary students (48% boys, 9-12 year-olds, 57 classes, nine schools) during 2018-2019…

Advanced theory-of-mind (AToM) development was investigated in three separate studies involving 82, 466, and 402 elementary school children (8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds). Rasch and factor analyses assessed whether common conceptual development underlies higher-order false-belief understanding, social understanding, emotion recognition, and…

Rule violations are likely to serve as key contexts for learning to reason about public identity. In an initial study with 91 children aged 4-9 years, social emotions and self-presentational concerns were more likely to be cited when children were responding to hypothetical vignettes involving social-conventional rather than moral violations. In 2…

Children and adolescents evaluated group inclusion and exclusion in the context of generic and group-specific norms involving morality and social conventions. Participants ("N" = 381), aged 9.5 and 13.5 years, judged an in-group member's decision to deviate from the norms of the group, whom to include, and whether their personal…

To assess predictions from social identity development theory (SIDT; Nesdale, 2004) concerning children's ethnic/racial prejudice, 197 Anglo-Australian children ages 7 or 9 years participated in a minimal group study as a member of a team that had a norm of inclusion or exclusion. The team was threatened or not threatened by an out-group that was…