Religious polarization and justification of belief in invisible scientific versus religious entities.

Children and adults express greater confidence in the existence of invisible scientific as compared to invisible religious entities. To further examine this differential confidence, 5- to 11-year-old Turkish children and their parents (N = 174, 122 females) from various regions in Türkiye, a country with an ongoing tension between secularism and religion, were tested in 2021 for their belief in invisible entities. Participants expressed more confidence in the existence of scientific than religious entities. For scientific entities, children justified their belief primarily by elaborating on the properties of the entity, rather than referring to the testimonial source of their judgment. This pattern was reversed for religious entities, arguably, highlighting the role of polarization in shaping the testimony children typically hear.

Being nice by choice: The effect of counterfactual reasoning on children's social evaluations.

The ability to engage in counterfactual thinking (reason about what else could have happened) is critical to learning, agency, and social evaluation. However, not much is known about how individual differences in counterfactual reasoning may play a role in children's social evaluations. In the current study, we investigate how prompting children to engage in counterfactual thinking about positive moral actions impacts children's social evaluations. Eighty-seven 4-8-year-olds were introduced to a character who engaged in a positive moral action (shared a sticker with a friend) and asked about what else the character could have done with the sticker (counterfactual simulation). Children were asked to generate either a high number of counterfactuals (five alternative actions) or a low number of counterfactuals (one alternative action). Children were then asked a series of social evaluation questions contrasting that character with one who did not have a choice and had no alternatives (was told to give away the sticker to his friend). Results show that children who generated selfish counterfactuals were more likely to positively evaluate the character with choice than children who did not generate selfish counterfactuals, suggesting that generating counterfactuals most distant from the chosen action (prosociality) leads children to view prosocial actions more positively. We also found age-related changes: as children got older, regardless of the type of counterfactuals generated, they were more likely to evaluate the character with choice more positively. These results highlight the importance of counterfactual reasoning in the development of moral evaluations. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Older children were more likely to endorse agents who choose to share over those who do not have a choice. Children who were prompted to generate more counterfactuals were more likely to allocate resources to characters with choice. Children who generated selfish counterfactuals more positively evaluated agents with choice. Comparable to theories suggesting children punish willful transgressors more than accidental transgressors, we propose children also consider free will when making positive moral evaluations.

Hearing about a story character's negative emotional reaction to having been dishonest causes young children to cheat less.

There is extensive research on the development of cheating in early childhood but research on how to reduce it is rare. The present preregistered study examined whether telling young children about a story character's emotional reactions towards cheating could significantly reduce their tendency to cheat (N = 400; 199 boys; Age: 3-6 years). Results showed that telling older kindergarten children about the story character's negative emotional reaction towards rule violation significantly reduced cheating, but telling them about the positive emotional reaction towards rule adherence did not. These results show that children as young as age 5 are able to use information about another child's emotional reaction to guide their own moral behavior. In particular, highlighting another child's negative emotional reaction towards a moral transgression may be an effective way to reduce cheating in early childhood. This finding, along with earlier cheating reduction findings, suggests that although cheating is common in early childhood, simple methods can reduce its occurrence.

Older children verify adult claims because they are skeptical of those claims.

We investigated children's information seeking in response to a surprising claim (Study 1, N = 109, 54 Female, Range = 4.02-6.94 years, 49% White, 21% Mixed Ethnicity, 19% Southeast Asian, September 2019-March 2020; Study 2, N = 154, 74 Female, Range = 4.09-7.99, 50% White, 20% Mixed Ethnicity, 17% Southeast Asian, September 2020-December 2020). Relative to younger children, older children more often expressed skepticism about the adult's surprising claims (1-year increase, OR = 2.70) and more often suggested exploration strategies appropriate for testing the specific claim they heard (1-year increase, OR = 1.42). Controlling for age, recommending more targeted exploration strategies was associated with a greater likelihood of expressing skepticism about the adult's claim.

Beyond enjoyment: Young children consider the normative goodness of activity engagement when attributing happiness.

Individuals are typically happy when engaging in enjoyable activities. But many enjoyable activities could be harmful when engaged in to excess. Do children consider the normative goodness of activity engagement levels when attributing happiness? To examine this question, we presented children with enjoyable activities that are often harmless in moderation but harmful in excess. When told that engaging in their favorite activities at their preferred amount was either normatively good (i.e., harmless and permitted) or normatively bad (i.e., harmful and forbidden), 10- and 11-year-old and 7- and 8-year-old children (Study 1) and even 5-year-old children (Studies 2 and 3 with simplified methods) attributed less happiness when the engagement level was normatively bad than when it was normatively good both to themselves and to another child. Young children also perceived normatively bad engagement as less interesting and pleasurable (Study 3). The findings suggest that children consider the normative goodness of activity engagement (rather than enjoyment alone) when attributing happiness, illuminating how children understand happiness.

Chinese parents' support of preschoolers' mathematical development.

Research has documented the critical role played by the early home environment in children's mathematical development in Western contexts. Yet little is known about how Chinese parents support their preschoolers' development of math skills. The Chinese context is of particular interest because Chinese children outperform their Western counterparts in math, even early in development. The current study sought to fill this gap by examining a sample of 90 families of 4- and 5-year-olds from mainland China. Parental support-as measured by the frequency of parent-child engagement in home activities as well as parent number talk-and parents' role in children's numeracy skills were investigated. Results indicate wide variation among parents in both types of support. Frequency of engagement in formal numeracy activities, including counting objects and reading number story books, was related to children's knowledge of cardinality. A principal components analysis did not identify informal numeracy activities as a distinct home activity component, likely due to the infrequent occurrences of game-like numeracy activities among the Chinese families. Instead, a structured activity component emerged (e.g., playing musical instruments) and was positively related to children's arithmetic skills. Diversity, but not quantity, of parent number talk was related to children's symbolic magnitude understanding. The distinctive relationships between specific parental measures and child outcomes speak to the need for nuanced identification of home environment factors that are beneficial to particular math competencies. The findings also suggest cultural variations in the mechanisms that support children's mathematical development, highlighting the merits of investigating this topic in non-Western contexts.

Miraculous, magical, or mundane? The development of beliefs about stories with divine, magical, or realistic causation.

Children's naïve theories about causal regularities enable them to differentiate factual narratives describing real events and characters from fictional narratives describing made-up events and characters (Corriveau, Kim, Schwalen, & Harris, Cognition 113 (2): 213-225, 2009). But what happens when children are consistently presented with accounts of miraculous and causally impossible events as real occurrences? Previous research has shown that preschoolers with consistent exposure to religious teaching tend to systematically judge characters involved in fantastical or religious events as real (Corriveau et al., Cognitive Science, 39 (2), 353-382, 2015; Davoodi et al., Developmental Psychology, 52 (2), 221, 2016). In the current study, we extended this line of work by asking about the scope of the impact of religious exposure on children's reality judgments. Specifically, we asked whether this effect is  domain-general or domain-specific. We tested children in Iran, where regular exposure to uniform religious beliefs might influence children's reasoning about possibility in non-religious domains, in addition to the domain of religion. Children with no or minimal schooling (5- to 6-year-olds) and older elementary school students (9- to 10-year-olds) judged the reality status of different kinds of stories, notably realistic, unusual (but nonetheless realistic), religious, and magical stories. We found that while younger children were not systematic in their judgments, older children often judged religious stories as real but rarely judged magical stories as real. This developmental pattern suggests that the impact of religious exposure on children's reality judgments does not extend beyond their reasoning about divine intervention. Children's justifications for their reality judgments provided further support for this domain-specific influence of religious teaching.

A counting intervention promotes fair sharing in preschoolers.

Recent work has probed the developmental mechanisms that promote fair sharing. This work investigated 2.5- to 5.5-year-olds' (N = 316; 52% female; 79% White; data collected 2016-2018) sharing behavior in relation to three cognitive correlates: number knowledge, working memory, and cognitive control. In contrast to working memory and cognitive control, number knowledge was uniquely associated with fair sharing even after controlling for the other correlates and for age. Results also showed a causal effect: After a 5-min counting intervention (vs. a control), children improved their fair sharing behavior from pre-test to post-test. Findings are discussed in light of how social, cognitive, and motivational factors impact sharing behavior.

The development of the imagination and imaginary worlds.

Evidence from developmental psychology on children's imagination is currently too limited to support Dubourg and Baumard's proposal and, in several respects, it is inconsistent with their proposal. Although children have impressive imaginative powers, we highlight the complexity of the developmental trajectory as well as the close connections between children's imagination and reality.

Early Constraints on the Imagination: The Realism of Young Children.

The imagination of young children has notable constraints. The outcomes and possibilities that they imagine rarely deviate from the everyday regularities they have observed and remembered. Their reality-based imagination is evident in a variety of contexts: early pretend play, envisioning the future, judgments about what is possible, the instructive role of thought experiments, tool making, and figurative drawing. Overall, the evidence shows that children's imagination helps them to anticipate reality and its close alternatives. This perspective invites future research on the scope of children's thinking about counterfactual possibilities, their ability to make discoveries about reality on the basis of thought experiments, and the ways in which cultural input can expand the scope of the possibilities that they entertain.

Preschool Children Rarely Seek Empirical Data That Could Help Them Complete a Task When Observation and Testimony Conflict.

Children (N = 278, 34-71 months, 54% girls) were told which of two figurines turned on a music box and also observed empirical evidence either confirming or conflicting with that testimony. Children were then asked to sort novel figurines according to whether they could make the music box work or not. To see whether children would explore which figurine turned on the music box, especially when the observed and testimonial evidence conflicted, children were given access to the music box during their sorting. However, children rarely explored. Indeed, they struggled to disregard the misleading testimony both when sorting the figurines and when asked about a future attempt. In contrast, children who explored the effectiveness of the figurines dismissed the misleading testimony.

Young children update their trust in an informant's claim when experience tells them otherwise.

Across two experiments, an adult informant presented 220 preschoolers (34-71 months of age) with either a correct claim or an incorrect claim about how to activate a music box by using one of two toy figures. Children were then prompted to explore the figures and to discover whether the informant's claim was correct or incorrect. Children who discovered the claim to be incorrect no longer endorsed it. Moreover, their predictions regarding a new figure's ability to activate the music box were clearly affected by the reliability of the informant's prior claim. Thus, children reassess an informant's incorrect claim about an object in light of later empirical evidence and transfer their conclusions regarding the validity of that claim to subsequent objects.

Infants actively seek and transmit knowledge via communication.

Supporting the central claim that knowledge representation is more basic than belief representation, we focus on the emerging evidence for preverbal infants' active and selective communication based on their representation of both knowledge and ignorance. We highlight infants' ontogenetically early deliberate information seeking and information transmission in the context of active social learning, arguing that these capacities are unique to humans.

Are high levels of religiosity inconsistent with a high valuation of science? Evidence from the United States, China and Iran.

We asked whether high levels of religiosity are inconsistent with a high valuation of science. We explored this possibility in three countries that diverge markedly in the relation between the state and religion. Parents in the United States (n = 126), China (n = 234) and Iran (n = 77) completed a survey about their personal and parental stance towards science. The relation between religiosity and the valuation of science varied sharply by country. In the U.S. sample, greater religiosity was associated with a lower valuation of science. A similar but weaker negative relation was found in the Chinese sample. Parents in the Iranian sample, by contrast, valued science highly, despite high levels of religiosity. Given the small size of our United States and Iranian samples, and the non-probabilistic nature of our samples in general, we caution readers not to generalise our findings beyond the current samples. Despite this caveat, these findings qualify the assumption that religiosity is inconsistent with the valuation of science and highlight the role of sociocultural context in shaping adults' perception of the relation between religion and science.

Essentialization of Social Categories Across Development in Two Cultures.

Children display an "essentialist" bias in their everyday thinking about social categories. However, the degree and form of this bias varies with age and with the nature of the categories, as well as across cultures. This project investigated the development of the essentialist bias across five social categories (i.e., gender, nationality, religious affiliation, socioeconomic status (rich/poor), and sports-team supporter) in two countries. Children between 5 and 10 years of age in Turkey (Study 1, N = 74) and the United States (Study 2, N = 73), as well as adults in both countries (Study 3, N = 223), participated. Results indicate surprising cross-cultural parallels with respect to both the rank ordering of essentialist thinking across these five categories and increasing differentiation among them over development.

Young children communicate their ignorance and ask questions.

Children acquire information, especially about the culture in which they are being raised, by listening to other people. Recent evidence has shown that young children are selective learners who preferentially accept information, especially from informants who are likely to be representative of the surrounding culture. However, the extent to which children understand this process of information transmission and actively exploit it to fill gaps in their knowledge has not been systematically investigated. We review evidence that toddlers exhibit various expressive behaviors when faced with knowledge gaps. They look toward an available adult, convey ignorance via nonverbal gestures (flips/shrugs), and increasingly produce verbal acknowledgments of ignorance ("I don't know"). They also produce comments and questions about what their interlocutors might know and adopt an interrogative stance toward them. Thus, in the second and third years, children actively seek information from interlocutors via nonverbal gestures or verbal questions and display a heightened tendency to encode and retain such sought-after information.

Explaining early moral hypocrisy: Numerical cognition promotes equal sharing behavior in preschool-aged children.

Recent work has documented that despite preschool-aged children's understanding of social norms surrounding sharing, they fail to share their resources equally in many contexts. Here we explored two hypotheses for this failure: an insufficient motivation hypothesis and an insufficient cognitive resources hypothesis. With respect to the latter, we specifically explored whether children's numerical cognition-their understanding of the cardinal principle-might underpin their abilities to share equally. In Experiment 1, preschoolers' numerical cognition fully mediated age-related changes in children's fair sharing. We found little support for the insufficient motivation hypothesis-children stated that they had shared fairly, and failures in sharing fairly were a reflection of their number knowledge. Numerical cognition did not relate to children's knowledge of the norms of equality (Experiment 2). Results suggest that the knowledge-behavior gap in fairness may be partly explained by the differences in cognitive skills required for conceptual and behavioral equality.

Cognitive Foundations of Learning from Testimony.

Humans acquire much of their knowledge from the testimony of other people. An understanding of the way that information can be conveyed via gesture and vocalization is present in infancy. Thus, infants seek information from well-informed interlocutors, supply information to the ignorant, and make sense of communicative acts that they observe from a third-party perspective. This basic understanding is refined in the course of development. As they age, children's reasoning about testimony increasingly reflects an ability not just to detect imperfect or inaccurate claims but also to assess what inferences may or may not be drawn about informants given their particular situation. Children also attend to the broader characteristics of particular informants-their group membership, personality characteristics, and agreement or disagreement with other potential informants. When presented with unexpected or counterintuitive testimony, children are prone to set aside their own prior convictions, but they may sometimes defer to informants for inherently social reasons.

The impact of emotional expressions on children's trust judgments.

Research on the development of selective trust has shown that young children do not indiscriminately trust all potential informants. They are likely to seek and endorse information from individuals who have proven competent or benign in the past. However, research on trust among adults raises the possibility that children might also be influenced by the emotions expressed by potential informants. In particular, they might trust individuals expressing more positive emotion. Indeed, young children's trust in particular informants based on their past behaviour might be undermined by their currently expressed emotions. To examine this possibility, we tested the selective trust of fifty 4- and 5-year-olds in two steps. We first confirmed that children are likely to invest more trust in individuals expressing more positive emotion. We then showed that even if children have already formed an impression of two potential informants based on their behavioural record, their choices about whose claims to trust are markedly influenced by the degree of positive emotion currently expressed by the two informants. By implication, the facial emotions expressed by potential informants can undermine young children's selective trust based on the behavioural record of those informants.

The Development of Selective Copying: Children's Learning From an Expert Versus Their Mother.

This study tested the prediction that, with age, children should rely less on familiarity and more on expertise in their selective social learning. Experiment 1 (N = 50) found that 5- to 6-year-olds copied the technique their mother used to extract a prize from a novel puzzle box, in preference to both a stranger and an established expert. This bias occurred despite children acknowledging the expert model's superior capability. Experiment 2 (N = 50) demonstrated a shift in 7- to 8-year-olds toward copying the expert. Children aged 9-10 years did not copy according to a model bias. The findings of a follow-up study (N = 30) confirmed that, instead, they prioritized their own-partially flawed-causal understanding of the puzzle box.