Across three pre-registered studies (n = 221 4-9-year-olds, 51% female; 218 parents, 80% female; working- and middle-class backgrounds; data collected during 2019-2021) conducted in the US (Studies 1-2; 74% White) and China (Study 3; 100% Asian), we document the emergence of a preference for “strivers”. Beginning at age 7, strivers (who work really hard) were favored over naturals (who are really smart) in both cultures (R2 ranging .03-.11). We explored several lay beliefs surrounding this preference. Beliefs about outcomes and the controllability of effort predicted the striver preference: Children who expected strivers to be more successful than naturals and believed effort was more controllable than talent preferred strivers more. Implications of the striver preference in education and beyond are discussed.

Discrimination in the evaluation of others is a key cause of social inequality around the world. However, relatively little is known about psychological interventions that can be used to prevent biased evaluations. The limited evidence that exists on these strategies is spread across many methods and populations, making it difficult to generate reliable best practices that can be effective across contexts. In the present work, we held a research contest to solicit interventions with the goal of reducing discrimination based on physical attractiveness using a hypothetical admissions task. Thirty interventions were tested across four rounds of data collection (total N > 20,000). Using a signal detection theory approach to evaluate interventions, we identified two interventions that reduced discrimination by lessening both decision noise and decision bias, while two other interventions reduced overall discrimination by only lessening noise or bias. The most effective interventions largely provided concrete strategies that directed participants' attention toward decision-relevant criteria and away from socially biasing information, though the fact that very similar interventions produced differing effects on discrimination suggests certain key characteristics that are needed for manipulations to reliably impact judgment. The effects of these four interventions on decision bias, noise, or both also replicated in a different discrimination domain, political affiliation, and generalized to populations with self-reported hiring experience. Results of the contest for decreasing attractiveness-based favoritism suggest that identifying effective routes for changing discriminatory behavior is a challenge and that greater investment is needed to develop impactful, flexible, and scalable strategies for reducing discrimination. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Human beings naturally prefer and support ingroup members more than outgroup members, but to what extent do we morally value equal treatment to ingroups and outgroups? Across four preregistered studies, we examined the development of "group-transcendent fairness," that is, the moral endorsement of allocating resources equally to ingroup members and outgroup members. We found that when allocating common resources to ingroup and outgroup members, American adults (N = 549) thought it was morally right to allocate equally instead of giving more to their family, political, or minimal ingroup members, across high and low stakes (Study 1). This normative sense of group-transcendent fairness develops gradually: 4- to 6-year-olds tended to endorse ingroup favoritism, whereas by age 8 or 9 children endorsed intergroup fairness (Studies 2-3, N = 214). Adults from China (N = 200)-a culture that values ingroup loyalty-also endorsed intergroup fairness as morally right, suggesting this moral value is not specific to western societies where egalitarianism is emphasized (Study 4). In contrast to the normative endorsement of intergroup fairness, participants in all studies did not predict most people to be fair across contexts, suggesting group-transcendent fairness was perceived more as a prescriptive than a descriptive norm (Studies 1-4). Together, our studies reveal the robust presence of group-transcendent fairness, which is valued across group contexts and cultures, develops later than ingroup support, and is prescriptive but not descriptive by nature. The findings help illuminate the nature and development of one group-transcendent moral value that helps promote intergroup relations and societal progress. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

High achievers vary in terms of the constraints and difficulties they encounter on the road to success. The present study investigates whether and how children consider the constraints one overcomes in their beliefs and reasoning about academic achievement. Four- to 9-year-olds (N = 98, 57 girls, 41 boys) and their parents (N = 92, 80 females, 12 males) of Han ethnicity in China were asked whether they believed someone could choose to overcome internal constraints (i.e., lack of ability) or external constraints (i.e., lack of educational resources) to achieve academic success. They were then presented with two story characters who both achieved high exam scores. One of the characters had to overcome internal or external constraints to achieve a high exam score, while the other did not face these constraints. Participants were asked about their inferences (i.e., the level of effort) and comparative evaluations of the two characters. Clear developmental changes were found: With age, children increasingly believed that one could choose to overcome constraints to achieve academic success, and inferred that the character who overcame these constraints worked harder than the character who did not experience such constraints. Children also increasingly evaluated the character who overcame constraints more favorably than the character who did not experience such constraints. These findings advance research in children’s cognitive understanding of achievements and abilities by revealing that, as children get older, they gradually recognize the possibility and positivity of overcoming constraints to achieve success.

The affect misattribution procedure (AMP) is a measure of implicit evaluations, designed to index the automatic retrieval of evaluative knowledge. The AMP effect consists in participants evaluating neutral target stimuli positively when preceded by positive primes and negatively when preceded by negative primes. After multiple prior tests of intentionality, Hughes et al. (Behav Res Methods 55(4):1558–1586, 2023) examined the role of awareness in the AMP and found that AMP effects were larger when participants indicated that their response was influenced by the prime than when they did not. Here we report seven experiments (six preregistered; N = 2350) in which we vary the methodological features of the AMP to better understand this awareness effect. In Experiments 1–4, we establish variability in the magnitude of the awareness effect in response to variations in the AMP procedure. By introducing further modifications to the AMP procedure, Experiments 5–7 suggest an alternative explanation of the awareness effect, namely that awareness can be the outcome, rather than the cause, of evaluative congruency between primes and responses: Awareness effects emerged even when awareness could not have contributed to AMP effects, including when participants judged influence awareness for third parties or primes were presented post hoc. Finally, increasing the evaluative strength of the primes increased participants’ tendency to misattribute AMP effects to the influence of target stimuli. Together, the present findings suggest that AMP effects can create awareness effects rather than vice versa and support the AMP’s construct validity as a measure of unintentional evaluations of which participants are also potentially unaware.

Past work suggests that children have an overly rosy view of rich people that stays consistent across childhood. However, adults do not show explicit pro-rich biases and even hold negative stereotypes against the rich (e.g., thinking that rich people are cold and greedy). When does this developmental shift occur, and when do children develop more complex and differentiated understandings of the wealthy and the poor? The current work documents the developmental trajectory of 4-12-yr-old primarily American middle-class children's conceptualizations of the wealthy and the poor (total N = 164). We find: (1) age-related decreases in pro-rich preferences and stereotypes relative to the poor; (2) domain-sensitive stereotypes across prosociality, talent, and effort; (3) resource-specific behavioral expectations such that with age children increasingly expect the wealthy to contribute more material resources but not more time than the poor; (4) an increasing recognition of the unfairness of the wealth gap between the wealthy and the poor; and (5) a developing understanding of the link between wealth and power. In sum, this work illuminates the emergence of more complex understandings of wealth, poverty, and inequality.

Experimentally created "minimal" social groups are frequently used as a means to investigate core components of intergroup cognition in children and adults. Yet, it is unclear how the effects of such arbitrary group memberships compare to those of salient real-world group memberships (gender and race) when they are directly pitted against each other in the same studies. Across three studies, we investigate these comparisons in 4-7-year-olds. Study 1 (N = 48) establishes the minimal group paradigm, finding that children develop ingroup preferences as well as other forms of group-based reasoning (e.g., moral obligations) following random assignment to a minimal group. Study 2 (N = 96) and Study 3 (N = 48) directly compare this minimal group to a real-world social group (gender or race) in a cross-categorization paradigm, in which targets are participants' ingroups in terms of the minimal group and outgroups in terms of a real-world social group, or vice versa. The relative strength of the minimal group varies, but in general it either has a similar effect or a stronger effect as compared to race and in some cases even gender. Our results support the contention that an abstract tendency to divide the world into "us" and "them" is a central force in early intergroup cognition.

Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof and Todorov’s methodology across 11 world regions, 41 countries and 11,570 participants. When we used Oosterhof and Todorov’s original analysis strategy, the valence–dominance model generalized across regions. When we used an alternative methodology to allow for correlated dimensions, we observed much less generalization. Collectively, these results suggest that, while the valence–dominance model generalizes very well across regions when dimensions are forced to be orthogonal, regional differences are revealed when we use different extraction methods and correlate and rotate the dimension reduction solution. The stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 5 November 2018. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7611443.v1 . Jones et al. examine the generalizability of the valence–dominance model of social judgements of faces in 41 countries across 11 world regions. They find evidence of both generalizability and variation, depending on the analytical method.

The present study investigated 3- to 6-year-old (total n = 158) children’s restoration behaviors both when they were second-party victims (Experiment 1) and when they were third-party bystanders (Experiment 2) of transgressions. We also explored how group membership (based on color preference) affects these behaviors. We found that children preferred restoration to punishment, and that they emphasized restorative justice not only for themselves but also for others. Furthermore, when they were victims of transgressions, the tendency to choose restoration over punishment was stronger in older than younger children. Second-party restoration behavior was influenced by group concerns in that children treated ingroup transgressors more leniently than outgroup and unaffiliated transgressors, but third-party restoration behavior was not. Our research challenges the view that punishment is the standard response to transgressions and suggests that alternative options like restoration are sometimes preferred over punishment by young children.

When seeking to explain social regularities (such as gender differences in the labor market) people often rely on internal features of the targets, frequently neglecting structural and systemic factors external to the targets. For example, people might think women leave the job market after childbirth because they are less competent or are better suited for child-rearing than men, thereby eliding socio-cultural and economic factors that disadvantage women. Across two studies (total N = 192) we probe 4- and 5-year-olds and 7- and 8-year-olds' internal versus structural reasoning about gender. We explore the evaluative and behavioral implications of this reasoning process with both novel gendered behaviors that were experimentally created and familiar gendered behaviors that exist outside of a lab context. We show that children generate more structural explanations, evaluate the structural explanation more positively, expect behaviors to be more mutable, and evaluate gender non-conforming behaviors more positively when structural cues are provided. However, we also show that such information may be of limited effectiveness at reducing pre-existing group-based discriminatory behaviors: children continue to report less willingness to affiliate with peers who display non-conforming behaviors even in the presence of structural cues. Taken together, these results provide evidence concerning children's structural reasoning about gender categories and shed new light on how such reasoning might affect social evaluations and behavioral intentions.

Punishment is important for deterring transgressions and maintaining cooperation, while restoration is also an effective way to resolve conflicts and undo harm. Which way do children prefer when evaluating others' reactions to immorality? Across four experiments, Chinese preschoolers (aged 4–6, n = 184) evaluated victims' different reactions to possession violations (i.e., punishing the perpetrator or restoring the belongings). Children evaluated restorative reactions more positively than punitive ones. This tendency to favor restoration over punishment was influenced by the degree of punishment, with more pronounced patterns observed when punishment was harsher (Experiments 1–3). Indeed, when different degrees of punishment were directly contrasted (Experiment 4), children viewed victims who imposed milder punishment (“steal one object, remove one or two objects”) more positively than those who imposed harsh punishment (“steal one object, remove three objects”). These patterns were especially manifested in preschoolers who chose restoration when being put in the victim's situation, suggesting a consistency between evaluations and behaviors. Taken together, the current study showed that children prioritize protecting the victim over harshly punishing the perpetrator, which suggests an early take on the preferred way to uphold justice.

The present studies (total n = 151) experimentally manipulated meaningfulness in novel social groups and measured any resulting ingroup biases. Study 1 showed that even when groups were arbitrary and presumptively meaningless, 5- to 8-year-olds developed equally strong ingroup biases as did children in more meaningful groups. Study 2 explored the lengths required to effectively reduce ingroup biases by stressing the arbitrariness of the grouping dimension. Even in this case ingroup bias persisted in resource allocation behavior, though it was attenuated on preference and similarity measures. These results suggested that one has to go to great lengths to counteract children’s tendency to imbue newly encountered social groups with rich affiliative meaning.

While much research has focused on the ways in which stereotyping and prejudice follow from category-based perception of others, less work has examined how and when category-based perception emerges in the first place. Here we adopt a number estimation task to explore perceivers’ ability to estimate the number of individuals belonging to a given social category (race or gender) from briefly presented arrays of faces. We also investigate facial features that are crucial for this ability. Across 6 pre-registered studies (n = 461) we present novel evidence that 1) people can extract gender and race from brief displays of up to 14 faces (performance for race is better than gender estimation, approaching that in dot estimation); 2) only the encoding of gender is affected when hair is removed from faces, while the encoding of both gender and race is disrupted when luminance levels of the faces are equalized; and 3) this ability is disrupted by inversion when hair has been removed and luminance has been controlled but not when the stimuli are uncontrolled. This research investigates people’s social category enumeration abilities with manipulations and nonsocial stimuli comparisons, and has implications for person perception and prejudice formation.

Human flourishing depends on individuals paying costs to contribute to the common good, but such arrangements are vulnerable to free riding, in which individuals benefit from others' contributions without paying costs themselves. Systems of tracking and sanctioning free riders can stabilize cooperation, but the origin of such tendencies is not well understood. Here, we provide evidence that children as young as 4 years old negatively evaluate and sanction free riders. Across six studies, we showed that these tendencies are robust, large in magnitude, tuned to intentional rather than unintentional noncontribution, and generally consistent across third- and first-party cases. Further, these effects cannot be accounted for by factors that frequently co-occur with free riding, such as nonconforming behaviors or the costs that free riding imposes on the group. Our findings demonstrate that from early in life, children both hold and enforce a normative expectation that individuals are intrinsically obligated to contribute to the common good.