As adults, we might understand that beliefs often spread because people are strongly influenced by their friends, family, and other social connections. However, do we think those influences are strong enough to overrule direct evidence of a friend's unreliability? And do preschoolers expect people to show such biases toward friends and to…

When deciding whether to trust someone's claims, how do children combine - over multiple interactions - information about that person's general behavioral tendencies (traits) with that person's ongoing (and changing) rate of providing accurate claims? Children aged 4-8 played 11 rounds of a find-the-sticker game. For each round, an informant…

Adults use an individual's behavior in one moral subdomain to make inferences about how they will act in another moral subdomain, reflecting a tendency to attribute underlying traits to individuals. We recruited 4- to 7-year-old children from a large city in North America to investigate their ability to generalize from one moral subdomain to…

Gratitude is a positive social emotion that one experiences when one has benefited from another person's goodwill (McCullough, 2002). Feeling gratitude urges the grateful person to reciprocate and respond prosocially, thereby solidifying cooperation. Yet little prior research has focused on the social functions of displaying gratitude, namely to…

Interpersonal trust is a key component of cooperation, helping support the complexsocial networks found across societies. Trust typically involves two parties, one who "trusts" by taking on risk through investment in a second party, who can be "trustworthy" and produce mutual benefits. To date, the developmental literature has…

Adults and children easily distinguish between fine-grained variations in trustworthiness intensity based on facial appearance, but the developmental origins of this fundamental social skill are still debated. Using a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) oddball paradigm coupled with electroencephalographic (EEG) recording, we investigated…

Who do children trust? We investigated the extent to which children use face-based versus behavior-based cues when deciding whom to trust in a multiturn economic trust game. Children's (N = 42; aged 8 to 10 years; 31 females; predominantly White) trust decisions were informed by an interaction between face-based and behavior-based cues to…

This study investigated 8- to 14-year-old U.S. children's (N = 202, 47% girls, and 49% White) evaluations of statements reflecting individual and structural attributions for the causes of racial inequality between Black and White people in the United States, the epistemic characteristics they used to seek out more information on this topic, and…

Most cooperative interactions involve interpersonal trust and the expectation of mutual reciprocation. Thus, understanding when and how humans acquire interpersonal trust can help unveil the origins and development of children's cooperative behavior. Here, we investigated whether prior sociomoral information about trading partners modulates the…

One developmental task faced by children is to identify, remember, and learn from epistemic and moral agents around them who are known to be good or virtuous. Here, in 2 studies, we examined U.S children's (N = 138; 55% female, 45% male; predominantly White, middle-class) memory processes for agents varying in moral and epistemic virtue. In Study…

People rely on reputational information communicated via gossip when deciding about with whom to cooperate, whom to believe, and whom to trust. In two studies, we investigated whether 5- and 7-year-old children trust in gossip when determining a course of action. In Study 1, 5- and 7-year-old German-speaking peer dyads (N = 64 dyads, 32 female…

As children increasingly interact with digital voice assistants, it is important to know whether they treat these devices as reliable information sources. Two studies investigated children's trust in and recall of statements made by a novel voice assistant and a human informant. In Study 1, children ages 4-5 (M[subscript age] = 5.05; 20 boys, 20…

Two studies examined the process and aftermath of coming to disbelieve in the myth of Santa Claus. In Study 1, 48 children ages 6-15 answered questions about how they discovered Santa was not real and how the discovery made them feel, and 44 of their parents shared their perspectives and how they promoted Santa. In Study 2, 383 adults reflected on…

Secrets play a powerful role in human social relationships. Here, we examine the developmental trajectory of 3- to 10-year-old children's (N = 630) expectations about (a) how relationships impact whether people will keep secrets, and (b) how relationships are impacted when a confidee keeps versus tells a confider's secret. Sophisticated…

Racial socialization is a culturally relevant parenting strategy known to combat the detrimental consequences of racial discrimination for African American youth. Three limitations hinder our developmental understanding of the racial socialization process. Few studies have accounted for the combination of messages that primary caregivers convey,…