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…

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.…

As children get older, they become better able to discriminate between impossible and improbable statements and they realize that improbable events can occur in reality while impossible ones cannot. However, when children hear about extraordinary events from fictional entities (e.g., popular characters from children's media), they may be more…

How do children reason about academic performance across development? A classic view suggests children's intuitive theories in this domain undergo qualitative changes. According to this view, older children and adults consider both effort and skill as sources of performance (i.e., a "performance = effort + skill" theory), but younger…

Summer is a time of reduced physical activity (PA) for children; however, summer care programs (SCPs) can provide opportunities for children to be active and foster friendships. This study investigated associations between PA and friendship formation at SCPs. Children (ages 8-12 years) from two SCPs reported demographics, PA, and up to five…

During the pandemic-related school closures and lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, listening to stories, whether through audiobooks or podcasts, was a lifeline for many children and adults (see Best & Clark, 2020 and Best, Clark, Perry & Riad, 2022). Around this time, the National Literacy Trust also began asking children and young people about…

This study investigated children's and adolescents' predictions regarding intergroup inclusion in contexts where peers differed on two dimensions of group membership: race and wealth. African American and European American participants (N = 153; age range: 8-14 years, M[subscript age] = 11.46 years) made predictions about whether afterschool clubs…

This study investigated 3- to 11-year-old US children's (N = 348) perceptions of access to resources, social group preferences, and resource distribution decisions and reasoning when hypothetical peers differed in social class (poor or rich) and race (Black or White). Data were collected in 2019. The sample reflected the region where data were…

Institutions make new forms of acting possible: Signing executive orders, scoring goals, and officiating weddings are only possible because of the U.S. government, the rules of soccer, and the institution of marriage. Thus, when an individual occupies a particular social role (president, soccer player, and officiator), they acquire new ways of…

Listening to children's experiences of writing during the first lockdown in spring 2020, it became clear that for many it had been a time of increased creativity, with children writing everything from songs and stories to scripts, and some even beginning their own novels. Another prominent theme in the research last summer was that having more…

Research has shown that book ownership has a significant impact on life outcomes. In 2019, we found that that children who reported that they had a book of their own were not only more engaged with reading but also six times more likely to read above the level expected for their age than children who did not own a book (22% vs. 3.6%). We included…

The National Literacy Trust's research during the first national lockdown in spring 2020 showed that more children and young people said that they enjoyed reading and more read more often during lockdown compared with before the pandemic. Children and young people's comments suggested that this was because they suddenly had time to (re)engage with…

Background: Despite growing evidence that participation in psychological trauma research is well tolerated by children and parents, ethics boards may voice concerns regarding research with families with recent acute trauma exposure. Factors impacting child and parent experiences of research participation are not well documented, particularly for…

Making sense of human actions involves thinking about both "endogenous" influences (the internal mental states of agents) and "exogenous" influences (social, moral, and interpersonal constraints). Culture impacts how we weight the relative causal influence of these two influences. To examine these cultural influences in depth,…

Social participation represent one of the major outcomes of inclusive education. Students with additional support needs often encountered negative attitudes of social acceptance exhibited by their typically developing peers hindering their social participation in the educational context. This study explored the multicomponent structure of…