Children are developing alongside interactive technologies that can move, talk, and act like agents, but it is unclear if children's beliefs about the agency of these household technologies are similar to their beliefs about advanced, humanoid robots used in lab research. This study investigated 4-11-year-old children's (N = 127, M[subscript age]…

Adults use an individual's behavior in one moral subdomain to make inferences about how they will act in another moral subdomain, reflecting a tendency to attribute underlying traits to individuals. We recruited 4- to 7-year-old children from a large city in North America to investigate their ability to generalize from one moral subdomain to…

The goals of this study were to investigate (a) the dyadic relations of mothers' and children's perceptions of children's anxiety symptoms across development, (b) whether maternal perceptions of children's anxiety serve as a mediator of the association between maternal anxiety and child anxiety, and (c) whether sensitive/structured parenting…

Despite the potential benefits of children's confrontations of other children's racial biases--especially for targets of bias--little is known about how young children react upon observing instances of racial discrimination. In the present research, child participants completed a novel measure designed to test their reactions to another child's…

Adults often act considerately toward others, for example, by leaving the last cookie on a plate or stepping aside on a busy sidewalk. What do young children infer from observing considerate behavior? In three preregistered studies, we assess how young children evaluate considerate and inconsiderate behavior by showing them animated videos in…

In certain domains, people represent some of an individual's properties (e.g., a tiger's ferocity), but not others (e.g., a tiger's being in the zoo), as stemming from the assumed "essence" of the individual's category. How do children identify which properties of an individual are essentialized and which are not? Here, we examine…

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced children to reckon with the causal relations underlying disease transmission. What are children's theories of how COVID-19 is transmitted? And how do they understand the relation between COVID-19 susceptibility and the need for disease-mitigating behavior? We asked these questions in the context of children's…

Children have a robust social preference for people similar to them, like those who share their language, accent, and race. In the present research, we show that this preference can diminish when children consider who they want to learn about. Across three experiments, 4- to 6-year-olds (total N = 160; 74 female, 86 male, from the Waterloo region…

Children are sensitive to their own and others' epistemic states and use these to guide their learning and communication. Here, we systematically examined children's use of epistemic states to make diagnostic social inferences. Specifically, we investigated children's group membership inferences based on what others do and do not know and what…

The psychological mechanisms that subserve inductions about novel social categories in childhood are hotly debated. While research demonstrated that language, and in particular generic statements, plays a major role in how children learn to attribute properties to social categories, developmental theories propose other mechanisms. One theoretical…

The moral self-concept (MSC) is an early indicator of how children view themselves as moral agents. It has been proposed that an important feature of an established self-concept (SC) is sufficient coherency in how one views oneself. Furthermore, the MSC is expected to develop into a multidimensional, hierarchical construct which is stable over…

Past research has demonstrated that both consequentialist motives (such as deterrence) and deontological motives (such as "just deserts") underlie children's and adults' punitive behavior. But what motives do we ascribe to others who pursue punishment? The present work explores this question by assessing which punitive motives children…

Children's socioeconomic status (SES) is linked to disparate access to resources and affects social behaviors such as inclusion and resource allocations. Yet it is unclear whether children's essentialized view of SES (i.e., believing SES is immutable) or subjective social status (SSS) influences behavioral biases toward high- versus low-SES peers.…

One developmental task faced by children is to identify, remember, and learn from epistemic and moral agents around them who are known to be good or virtuous. Here, in 2 studies, we examined U.S children's (N = 138; 55% female, 45% male; predominantly White, middle-class) memory processes for agents varying in moral and epistemic virtue. In Study…

Young children from a very early age not only prefer those who help others but also those who engage in altruistic helping. This study aims to test how children assess helping when the goal of the helping behavior is immoral. We argue that younger children consider only the helping versus hindering behavior, but older children distinguish their…