Much controversy surrounds questions about whether humans have an aversion to inequity and how a commitment to equality might play a role in cooperation and other aspects of social interactions. Examining the social decisions of children with autism spectrum disorders provides a fascinating opportunity to explore these issues. Specifically, we…

Rule violations are likely to serve as key contexts for learning to reason about public identity. In an initial study with 91 children aged 4-9 years, social emotions and self-presentational concerns were more likely to be cited when children were responding to hypothetical vignettes involving social-conventional rather than moral violations. In 2…

Research connecting children's understanding of mental states to their peer relations at school remains scarce. Previous work by the authors demonstrated that children's understanding of mental states in the context of a faux pas--a social blunder involving unintentional insult--is associated with concurrent peer rejection. The present report…

This study examined children's understanding of the distinctive "self-presentational" impacts of moral and social-conventional rule violations. A sample of 80 children aged 7-8 and 9-10 years generated examples of interpersonal events that would upset others and events that would elicit social attention to the self. As expected, both age groups…

Two experiments investigated children's implicit and explicit differentiation between beliefs about matters of fact and matters of opinion. In Experiment 1, 8- to 9-year-olds' (n = 88) explicit understanding of the subjectivity of opinions was found to be limited, but their conformity to others' judgments on a matter of opinion was considerably…

In an investigation of socially anxious children's social behavior and self-evaluation, 28 high socially anxious and 28 low socially anxious children, ages 11 to 13 years, appraised their performance before and after participating in a role-play task. Half of the children were given video feedback prior to giving their posttask self-evaluations.…

Previous research has suggested that the understanding of modesty--downplaying one's achievements to evoke a positive social evaluation--develops in the primary school years. However, very little is known about how children's understanding of modesty is associated with social contextual factors, such as audience type. A sample of 92 children aged…

Three experiments examined 6- to 11-year-olds' judgments about appropriate self-descriptions in front of different audiences. Findings indicated that only older children differentiated between an unfamiliar peer and unfamiliar adult audience in selecting one of two self-descriptive statements. Even the youngest children differentiated between…