The nonmeek inherit the earth: Children generalize dominance, but not submissiveness.

Children and even infants 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-do they think dominants and subordinates will maintain their status when interacting with novel partners? In three experiments, we investigate this question. Children (4- to 10-year-olds, N = 365) heard stories about a dominant and subordinate agent and predicted the dominant or subordinate agent's behavior with a novel agent. In all 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 (e.g., granting permission) in Study 1 and physical dominance (e.g., a fistfight) in Studies 2 and 3. Furthermore, although they believed dominant agents would win dominance contests (fistfights), they 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). However, even for physical dominance, 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. We discuss how these results extend past work on children's developing intuitions about dominance and prompt deeper questions about the inferences children draw from dominance interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Expectations of intergroup empathy bias emerge by early childhood.

Across two preregistered studies with children (3-12-year-olds; N = 356) and adults (N = 262) from the United States, we find robust expectations for intergroup empathic biases. Participants predicted that people would feel better about ingroup fortunes than outgroup fortunes and worse about ingroup misfortunes than outgroup misfortunes. Expectations of empathic bias were stronger when there was animosity and weaker when there was fondness between groups. The largest developmental differences emerged in participants' expectations about how others feel about outgroup misfortunes, particularly when there was intergroup animosity. Whereas young children (3-5-year-olds) generally expected people to feel empathy for the outgroup (regardless of the relationship between the groups), older children (9-12-year-olds) and adults expected Schadenfreude (feeling good when an outgroup experiences a misfortune) when the groups disliked one another. Overall, expectations of empathic biases emerge early but may be weaker when there are positive intergroup relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Children's memory for gender-neutral pronouns.

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 (N = 168; 79 boys, 89 girls, 0 gender-diverse). 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 and then to explicitly recall the characters' pronouns. 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. However, on most tasks, children only used "they" if a character had gender-neutral pronouns, and almost never used "they" if a character had gendered pronouns. We also found some evidence suggesting that older children more accurately recall gender-neutral pronouns compared with younger children.