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1. The effect of group status on children's hierarchy‐reinforcing beliefs

   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13393  

   Rizzo, Michael T. ; Roberts, Steven O. ; Rhodes, Marjorie ( November 2023 , Developmental Science)

   Members of advantaged groups are more likely than members of disadvantaged groups to think, feel, and behave in ways that reinforce their group's position within the hierarchy. This study examined how children's status within a group‐based hierarchy shapes their beliefs about the hierarchy and the groups that comprise it in ways that reinforce the hierarchy. To do this, we randomly assigned children (4–8 years;N = 123; 75 female, 48 male; 21 Asian, 9 Black, 21 Latino/a, 1 Middle‐Eastern/North‐African, 14 multiracial, 41 White, 16 not‐specified) to novel groups that differed in social status (advantaged, disadvantaged, neutral third‐party) and assessed their beliefs about the hierarchy. Across five separate assessments, advantaged‐group children were more likely to judge the hierarchy to be fair, generalizable, and wrong to challenge and were more likely to hold biased intergroup attitudes and exclude disadvantaged group members. In addition, with age, children in both the advantaged‐ and disadvantaged‐groups became more likely to see membership in their own group as inherited, while at the same time expecting group‐relevant behaviors to be determined more by the environment. With age, children also judged the hierarchy to be more unfair and expected the hierarchy to generalize across contexts. These findings provide novel insights into how children's position within hierarchies can contribute to the formation of hierarchy‐reinforcing beliefs.

   A total of 123 4–8‐year‐olds were assigned to advantaged, disadvantaged, and third‐party groups within a hierarchy and were assessed on seven hierarchy‐reinforcing beliefs about the hierarchy.

   Advantaged children were more likely to say the hierarchy was fair, generalizable, and wrong to challenge and to hold intergroup biases favoring advantaged group members.

   With age, advantaged‐ and disadvantaged‐group children held more essentialist beliefs about membership in their own group, but not the behaviors associated with their group.

   Results suggest that advantaged group status can shape how children perceive and respond to the hierarchies they are embedded within.

    

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2. What Could Go Wrong: Adults and Children Calibrate Predictions and Explanations of Others' Actions Based on Relative Reward and Danger

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13163  

   Gjata, Nensi N. ; Ullman, Tomer D. ; Spelke, Elizabeth S. ; Liu, Shari ( June 2022 , Cognitive Science)

   When human adults make decisions (e.g., wearing a seat belt), we often consider the negative consequences that would ensue if our actions were to fail, even if we have never experienced such a failure. Do the same considerations guide our understanding of other people's decisions? In this paper, we investigated whether adults, who have many years of experience making such decisions, and 6‐ and 7‐year‐old children, who have less experience and are demonstrably worse at judging the consequences of their own actions, conceive others' actions as motivated both by reward (how good reaching one's intended goal would be), and by what we call “danger” (how badly one's action could end). In two pre‐registered experiments, we tested whether adults and 6‐ and 7‐year‐old children tailor their predictions and explanations of an agent's action choices to the specific degree of danger and reward entailed by each action. Across four different tasks, we found that children and adults expected others to negatively appraise dangerous situations and minimize the danger of their actions. Children's and adults' judgments varied systematically in accord with both the degree of danger the agent faced and the value the agent placed on the goal state it aimed to achieve. However, children did not calibrate their inferences abouthow muchan agent valued the goal state of a successful action in accord with the degree of danger the action entailed, and adults calibrated these inferences more weakly than inferences concerning the agent's future action choices. These results suggest that from childhood, people use a degree of danger and reward to make quantitative, fine‐grained explanations and predictions about other people's behavior, consistent with computational models on theory of mind that contain continuous representations of other agents' action plans.

    

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

   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13394  

   Wong, Alyson ; Cordes, Sara ; Harris, Paul L. ; Chernyak, Nadia ( April 2023 , Developmental Science)

   The ability to engage in counterfactual thinking (reason about what elsecouldhave 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 whatelsethe 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 generatedselfishcounterfactuals 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.

   Older children were more likely to endorse agents whochooseto 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.

    

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4. Programming as a language for young children to express and explore mathematics in school

   https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13080  

   Goldenberg, E. Paul ; Carter, Cynthia J. ( May 2021 , British Journal of Educational Technology)

   Natural language helps express mathematical thinking and contexts. Conventional mathematical notation (CMN) best suits expressions and equations. Each is essential; each also has limitations, especially for learners. Our research studies how programming can be a advantageous third language that can also help restore mathematical connections that are hidden by topic‐centred curricula. Restoring opportunities for surprise and delight reclaims mathematics' creative nature. Studies of children's use of language in mathematics and their programming behaviours guide our iterative design/redesign of mathematical microworlds in which students, ages 7–11, use programming in their regular school lessonsas a language for learning mathematics. Though driven by mathematics, not coding, the microworlds develop the programming over time so that it continues to support children's developing mathematical ideas. This paper briefly describes microworlds EDC has tested with well over 400 7‐to‐8‐year‐olds in school, and others tested (or about to be tested) with over 200 8‐to‐11‐year‐olds. Our challenge was to satisfy schools' topical orientation and fit easily within regular classroom study but use and foreshadow other mathematical learning to remove the siloes. The design/redesign research and evaluation is exploratory, without formal methodology. We are also more formally studying effects on children's learning. That ongoing study is not reported here.

   What is already known

   Active learning—doing—supports learning.

   Collaborative learning—doingtogether—supports learning.

   Classroom discourse—focused, relevantdiscussion, not just listening—supports learning.

   Clear articulation of one's thinking, even just to oneself, helps develop that thinking.

   What this paper adds

   The common languages we use for classroom mathematics—natural language for conveying the meaning and context of mathematical situations and for explaining our reasoning; and the formal (written) language of conventional mathematical notation, the symbols we use in mathematical expressions and equations—are both essential but each presents hurdles that necessitate the other. Yet, even together, they are insufficient especially for young learners.

   Programming, appropriately designed and used, can be the third language that both reduces barriers and provides the missing expressive and creative capabilities children need.

   Appropriate design for use in regular mathematics classrooms requires making key mathematical content obvious, strong and the ‘driver’ of the activities, and requires reducing tech ‘overhead’ to near zero.

   Continued usefulness across the grades requires developing children's sophistication and knowledge with the language; the powerful ways that children rapidly acquire facility with (natural) language provides guidance for ways they can learn a formal language as well.

   Implications for policy and/or practice

   Mathematics teaching can take advantage of the ways children learn through experimentation and attention to the results, and of the ways children use their language brain even for mathematics.

   In particular, programming—in microworlds driven by the mathematical content, designed to minimise distraction and overhead, open to exploration and discoveryen routeto focused aims, and in which childrenself‐evaluate—can allow clear articulation of thought, experimentation with immediate feedback.

   As it aids the mathematics, it also builds computational thinking and satisfies schools' increasing concerns to broaden access to ideas of computer science.

    

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5. The impact of sufferers’ wealth status on pain perceptions: Its development and relation to allocation of healthcare resources

   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13467  

   Shu, Yuhang ; Li, Huisi ; Ma, Shaocong ; Bian, Lin ( December 2023 , Developmental Science)

   Wealth‐based disparities in health care wherein the poor receive undertreatment in painful conditions are a prominent issue that requires immediate attention. Research with adults suggests that these disparities are partly rooted in stereotypes associating poor individuals with pain insensitivity. However, whether and how children consider a sufferer's wealth status in their pain perceptions remains unknown. The present work addressed this question by testing 4‐ to 9‐year‐olds from the US and China. In Study 1 (N = 108, 56 girls, 79% White), US participants saw rich and poor White children experiencing identical injuries and indicated who they thought felt more pain. Although 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds responded at chance, children aged seven and above attributed more pain to the poor than to the rich. Study 2 with a new sample of US children (N = 111, 56 girls, 69% White) extended this effect to judgments of White adults’ pain. Pain judgments also informed children's prosocial behaviors, leading them to provide medical resources to the poor. Studies 3 (N = 118, 59 girls, 100% Asian) and 4 (N = 80, 40 girls, 100% Asian) found that, when evaluating White and Asian people's suffering, Chinese children began to attribute more pain to the poor than to the rich earlier than US children. Thus, unlike US adults, US children and Chinese children recognize the poor's pain from early on. These findings add to our knowledge of group‐based beliefs about pain sensitivity and have broad implications on ways to promote equitable health care.

   Four studies examined whether 4‐ to 9‐year‐old children's pain perceptions were influenced by sufferers’ wealth status.

   US children attributed more pain to White individuals of low wealth status than those of high wealth status by age seven.

   Chinese children demonstrated an earlier tendency to attribute more pain to the poor (versus the rich) compared to US children.

   Children's wealth‐based pain judgments underlied their tendency to provide healthcare resources to people of low wealth status.

    

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