The non-meek inherit the earth: Children generalize dominance, but not submissiveness.Co-authors: Hannah Hok, Anam Barakzai, Alex Shaw. Developmental Psychology.
Children have clear intuitions about power early in development; they can infer who is dominant and subordinate from observing a single interaction. However, it is unclear what children infer about each individual’s status from these interactions. Across three studies, we found that 7- to 10-year-olds generalized dominance, thinking the dominant would again be dominant or “in charge”, both for social power in Study 1 and physical dominance in Studies 2 and 3. They also did not believe they would win contests unrelated to dominance (math contests). Younger children did not generalize social power (Study 1) but did generalize physical dominance (Studies 2 and 3), but their generalizations were less selective (i.e., they believed the dominant would win fistfights and math contests). Notably, neither age group generalized an agent’s submissiveness in any of the studies—they did not believe a subordinate agent would again be subordinate when paired with a novel partner.
Expectations of intergroup empathy bias emerge by early childhood.Co-authors: Rodney Tompkins, Emily Gerdin, Yarrow Dunham, & Zoe Liberman. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Participants predicted that people would feel better about ingroup fortunes than outgroup fortunes and worse about ingroup misfortunes than outgroup misfortunes. These expectations of empathic bias were stronger when there was animosity and weaker when there was fondness between groups.
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Children's Memory for Gender-Neutral PronounsCo-authors: Rodney Tompkins, Kristina Olson, Yarrow Dunham.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Are there disparities in children’s memory for gender-neutral pronouns compared with gendered pronouns? We explored this question in two preregistered studies with 4- to 10-year-old children. Participants were presented with a memory task. An experimenter read an illustrated story about a target character. Participants were asked to verbally repeat the story to measure spontaneous pronoun use. In Study 1 the story characters had typically feminine or typically masculine appearances
(determined by independent raters), whereas in Study 2 the characters had gender-neutral appearances. In both studies, targets were referred to with gendered or gender-neutral pronouns. In both studies, children more accurately recalled gendered pronouns than gender-neutral pronouns. We also found some evidence suggesting that older children more accurately recall gender-neutral pronouns compared with younger children. |