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Framing public-health behaviors as benefiting others, rather than the self, can increase behavior uptake in adults. However, there are mixed results on the effects of such messaging in a vaccination context, and it is unclear how children reason about the social and moral implications of vaccination. In this study, we present school-aged children ( N = 60) with hypothetical vaccine-like behaviors and manipulate whether they benefit the self or others, and whether they prevent low or high severity harm. We find that children readily endorse these behaviors when they prevent high severity harm, and that the beneficiary of the behavior does not impact children’s endorsement. Younger children thought vaccine-like behaviors were morally important regardless of who they protected; However, as children get older, they thought about the vaccine-like behaviors in moral terms when they protected others. We discuss potential implications for how communications about vaccination may impact children’s reasoning about others.
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This content will become publicly available on August 14, 2026
Hot hand thinking in children
A tendency to perceive illusory streaks or clumps in random sequences of data—the hot hand phenomenon—has been identified as a human universal tied to our evolutionary history of foraging for clumpy resources. We explored how this misperception of randomness and, more generally, ecologically relevant statistical thinking develops ontogenetically. Based on previous work with adults, we developed three tablet-based decision-making tasks that assessed how 3- to 10-year-old children in the U.S. and Germany decide whether sequential events will continue in a streak or not, their understanding of randomness, and their ability to reason about randomness in spatially dependent terms. Our analyses suggest that children, like adults, hold strong expectations of clumpy resources when they search through and reason about 1- and 2-dimensional statistical distributions. This evolved psychological default to clumped resources decreases somewhat with age. Future research should explore possible early interventions to improve statistical literacy and minimize the detrimental effects that (mis)perceptions of streaks and patterns can have on everyday life.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2116145
- PAR ID:
- 10627933
- Publisher / Repository:
- Elsevier
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Evolution and human behavior
- ISSN:
- 1090-5138
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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