Children in the United States face declining rates of upward social mobility, yet cultural narratives such as the American Dream persist, emphasizing that anyone can improve their circumstances while also distorting perceptions of opportunity and inequality. This article synthesizes emerging research on how children in the United States and China reason about social mobility. In early childhood, children view social status as malleable and recognize that opportunities for upward mobility are not equally accessible to all. With age, children increasingly explain disparities in upward mobility in terms of structural rather than individual factors and allocate resources to groups they view as less likely to experience mobility. Together, this research suggests that recognizing unequal opportunities for upward mobility is associated with behavior that rectifies, rather than perpetuates, inequality. We conclude by identifying key questions about how children’s beliefs and causal explanations about social mobility vary across social and cultural contexts, what experiences shape their emergence, and whether the expression or correlates of beliefs about social mobility change from childhood to adulthood.
What are the origins of intelligence? We argue that intelligence develops when flexible, domain-general brains adapt to experiences produced by structured, domain-optimized bodies. Brains are highly plastic and can assume many possible functional configurations, whereas bodies (e.g., retina, cochlea, skin, muscles) form relatively stable structures that shape the information available for learning. By filtering raw input into structured patterns, bodies generate the experiences that allow domain-general brains to develop domain-specific knowledge. Drawing on controlled-rearing studies of newborn animals and embodied AI models, we show how object perception—a core mental skill often viewed as innate—develops automatically when flexible neural networks adapt to first-person sensory experience. The body contributes at multiple stages: generating prenatal activity that establishes initial cortical organization, generating postnatal experiences that drive object learning, and structuring visual input to enhance object perception. Intelligence across biological and artificial systems emerges from the interaction between flexible brains and structured bodies.
The theory of sexuality as gendered holds that sexual orientation and gender are inseparably linked, shaping individual experience and perceptions as well as sociocultural systems. Although long recognized in feminist and queer theory and analyzed in some domains in the psychological sciences, this connection has the potential for much broader reach. This article advances the framework by outlining three broad hypotheses: Beliefs and behaviors toward lesbian, gay, and bisexual people will be grounded in gender norms; institutional treatment of sexual minorities will mirror patterns of gender equality and treatment of women; and known gender differences will reveal analogous differences by sexual orientation. Together, these hypotheses highlight the generative scientific potential of viewing sexuality and gender as intertwined rather than separate dimensions.
Generative AI (GenAI) has transformed many aspects of modern life. In this article, we explore the potential of GenAI for personalized persuasion: the process of tailoring the content of a persuasive message to an individual's unique preferences, needs, and motivations. First, we describe how GenAI addresses the "identification-customization" challenge in personalized persuasion, and we offer a scoping review of the research supporting its effectiveness to date. Second, we introduce a framework that allows researchers to classify a study's empirical approach according to several critical design choices, including (a) the data sources and types of personal information used to determine the personalized elements, (b) the complexity of the personalization approach, and (c) the delivery of the personalized content. This framework facilitates the integration of existing work and identifies important gaps in our current knowledge. We discuss promising avenues for future research throughout and conclude with a discussion of important ethical considerations.
Social anhedonia, the inability to experience social pleasure, is a transdiagnostic symptom. Current research on social anhedonia adopts a monolithic approach to evaluate and treat this complex symptom. In this article, we reconceptualize social anhedonia using a triune framework encompassing functional, ecological, and ethological validity. This framework can better guide the future development of assessment tools and interventions. Moreover, it addresses the online-versus-offline, contextualized-versus-decontextualized aspects of social anhedonia in the digital era. We argue that future assessment tools should adopt virtual reality and multimodal data-collection platforms. Personalized, dimension-specific interventions are likely to be more effective. Our timely revisit paves ways for more sophisticated, context-sensitive evaluations and interventions for social anhedonia.
