Theory of mind is related to children's resource allocations in gender stereotypic contexts

Structural explanations lead young children and adults to rectify resource inequalities

Decisions about how to divide resources have profound social and practical consequences. Do explanations regarding the source of existing inequalities influence how children and adults allocate new resources? When 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 201) learned that inequalities were caused by structural forces (stable external constraints affecting access to resources) as opposed to internal forces (effort), they rectified inequalities, overriding previously documented tendencies to perpetuate inequality or divide resources equally. Adults (N = 201) were more likely than children to rectify inequality spontaneously; this was further strengthened by a structural explanation but reversed by an effort-based explanation. Allocation behaviors were mirrored in judgments of which allocation choices by others were appropriate. These findings reveal how explanations powerfully guide social reasoning and action from childhood through adulthood.

Morally-Relevant Theory of Mind is Related to Viewing Gender Inequalities as Unacceptable

Previous research has shown that morally-relevant theory of mind enables children to avoid blaming a peer for an accidental transgression. The current study investigated whether this form of theory of mind helps children recognize that gender inequalities are unfair and create negative emotional experiences. Further, the study examined this ability across three perspectives (for themselves, for those who have been advantaged by inequality, and for those who have been disadvantaged by inequality). Participants were 141 children (M Age = 6.67 years, 49% female, 32% ethnic/racial minority) recruited from the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. Experience with the negative consequences of gender bias and more advanced mental state understanding was associated with more negative evaluations of gender inequalities and more neutral attributions of others' emotions. These findings shed light on the role of different forms of mental state understanding in children's evaluations of inequalities based on gender.

The effect of competition on children's merit-based resource allocation: The difference between interpersonal and intergroup competition

Competition usually exists in groups in everyday interactions, but how children allocate according to competition outcomes (e.g., merit-based allocation) after intergroup competition and the difference in children's allocations of rewards between interpersonal and intergroup competition remain unclear. Children aged 3-8 years were asked to complete interpersonal or intergroup competitive games and were further asked to allocate rewards between themselves and their partners (Study 1) or between their group and the other group (Studies 2 and 3) and to reason about their decisions. We found that after interpersonal competition, children tended to conduct merit-based allocations when they won but were more inclined to conduct equal allocations when they lost; after intergroup competition, children were more inclined to make equal allocations regardless of whether they won or lost, only less than half of children followed meritorious principles. However, children conducted more merit-based allocations with age after both interpersonal and intergroup competitions. In addition, children showed less bias towards their own side after intergroup competition than after interpersonal competition. Finally, they demonstrated an earlier proclivity towards being influenced by winning outcomes than by losing outcomes after interpersonal competition, whereas a converse tendency was found after intergroup competition.

TANGO: A reliable, open-source, browser-based task to assess individual differences in gaze understanding in 3 to 5-year-old children and adults

Traditional measures of social cognition used in developmental research often lack satisfactory psychometric properties and are not designed to capture variation between individuals. Here, we present the TANGO (Task for Assessing iNdividual differences in Gaze understanding-Open); a brief (approx. 5-10min), reliable, open-source task to quantify individual differences in the understanding of gaze cues. Localizing the attentional focus of an agent is crucial in inferring their mental states, building common ground, and thus, supporting cooperation. Our interactive browser-based task works across devices and enables in-person and remote testing. The implemented spatial layout allows for discrete and continuous measures of participants' click imprecision and is easily adaptable to different study requirements. Our task measures inter-individual differences in a child (N = 387) and an adult (N = 236) sample. Our two study versions and data collection modes yield comparable results that show substantial developmental gains: the older children are, the more accurately they locate the target. High internal consistency and test-retest reliability estimates underline that the captured variation is systematic. Associations with social-environmental factors and language skills speak to the validity of the task. This work shows a promising way forward in studying individual differences in social cognition and will help us explore the structure and development of our core social-cognitive processes in greater detail.

The influence of social status on children's merit-based resource allocation: The potential explanation of expectation

How 3- to 11-year-old children integrate recipients' merit and social status when allocating resources was examined in 2021 and 2022. Study 1 (Han Chinese, n = 309, 150 girls) showed that while children prioritized merit, they developed from favoring high-status recipients to favoring low-status recipients. Study 2 (n = 194, 98 girls) and Study 3 (n = 138, 68 girls) revealed that children held stereotypes about the relation between merit and social status which shifted with age from expecting high-status peers to expecting low-status peers to work harder, these expectations corresponded allocation decisions. These findings suggest children shift from perpetuating to rectifying inequity and changing stereotypes about people of different social status may serve an important function in the process.

Science resource inequalities viewed as less wrong when girls are disadvantaged

In response to some resource inequalities, children give priority to moral concerns. Yet, in others, children show ingroup preferences in their evaluations and resource allocations. The present study built upon this knowledge by investigating children's and young adults' (N = 144; 5-6-year-olds, M age = 5.83, SD age = .97; 9-11-year-olds, M age = 10.74, SD age = .68; and young adults, M age = 19.92, SD age = 1.10) evaluations and allocation decisions in a science inequality context. Participants viewed vignettes in which male and female groups received unequal amounts of science supplies, then evaluated the acceptability of the resource inequalities, allocated new boxes of science supplies between the groups, and provided justifications for their choices. Results revealed both children and young adults evaluated inequalities of science resources less negatively when girls were disadvantaged than when boys were disadvantaged. Further, 5- to 6-year-old participants and male participants rectified science resource inequalities to a greater extent when the inequality disadvantaged boys compared to when it disadvantaged girls. Generally, participants who used moral reasoning to justify their responses negatively evaluated and rectified the resource inequalities, whereas participants who used group-focused reasoning positively evaluated and perpetuated the inequalities, though some age and participant gender findings emerged. Together, these findings reveal subtle gender biases that may contribute to perpetuating gender-based science inequalities both in childhood and adulthood.

Prospective associations between mothers' and fathers' parenting styles and adolescents' moral values: Stability and specificity by parent style and adolescent gender

This study coordinates moral value development in adolescence, parenting style, and gender with issues of stability and specificity. The primary research question asked whether parenting styles of mothers and fathers influence the development of adolescent moral values, and secondary research questions asked whether adolescent moral values were stable and whether gender moderated predictive relations of parenting styles and adolescent moral values. At 14 and 18 years, a sample of 246 adolescents completed the Sociomoral Reflection Objective Measure - Short Form; at 14 years, mothers and fathers self-reported their parenting styles using the Parental Authority Questionnaire. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses established a 2-factor model of adolescent moral values across the two ages: Life and Social Contract captured prosocial aspects of morality that are left to individual choice, and Law and Social Order captured acts that are legally or morally obligatory for individuals to perform. Structural equation modeling investigated relations between parental parenting styles and the two adolescent moral value factors, with adolescent age, gender, and family SES as covariates. Both moral values factors had high stabilities across the 4-year period. Mothers' authoritarian parenting at 14 years, but not their authoritative or permissive parenting, negatively predicted Life and Social Contract moral values, but not Law and Social Order, in adolescents at 18 years, more so for boys. Fathers' parenting styles did not predict adolescents' moral values at 18 years. Girls and adolescents from higher-SES families had higher Life and Social Contract moral values at 14 years; boys experienced more increases in Life and Social Contract moral values from 14 to 18 years than girls. Stability and parental predictive validity of moral values for adolescence are discussed.

Preschoolers' ingroup bias in predicting others' sharing: The role of contexts and theory of mind

The current study investigated preschoolers' ingroup bias in predicting people's sharing across contexts and its relation to second-order theory of mind (ToM) ability. In Experiment 1, 96 5- and 6-year-old children were assigned to one of two groups in a minimal group paradigm. They heard a story about fictional ingroup and outgroup peers sharing in a public or private condition and were asked to predict and evaluate their sharing behavior. Children predicted that ingroup peers would share more than outgroup peers and also showed ingroup bias in evaluation regardless of the equal actual sharing of ingroup and outgroup peers. Moreover, 6-year-olds displayed a flexible ingroup bias in predicting others' sharing across conditions because they held such a bias only in public conditions and did not expect ingroup and outgroup peers to share differently in private conditions. Experiment 2 tested a new sample of 80 6-year-olds with the same sharing story and a second-order false belief task. Results showed that only 6-year-olds who fully passed the false belief task showed a flexible bias in predicting sharing across conditions. Results indicate that children's ingroup bias in predicting others' sharing is becoming flexible across contexts as they grow up and ToM skills contribute to the development of their increasingly sophisticated prosocial reasoning.

Overhearing Brief Negative Messages Has Lasting Effects on Children's Attitudes Toward Novel Social Groups

Societies are rife with out-group discrimination and mistreatment. One way that children might acquire social biases that lead to such outcomes is by overhearing derogatory or disparaging comments about social groups. Children (n = 121) overheard a video call between a researcher and an adult or child caller who made negative claims (or no claims) about a novel social group. Immediately and following a 2-week delay, older children (7-9 years) who overheard the message demonstrated stronger negative attitudes toward the group than children who heard no message. Younger children's (4- to 5-year-olds') attitudes were generally unaffected by these claims. Thus, overhearing brief, indirect messages from children or adults had robust and lasting effects on the social biases of children 7 years and older.

Friendship is more than strategic reciprocity: Preschoolers' selective sharing with friends cannot be reduced to strategic concerns

The current study investigated whether children share especially much with their friends when sharing can be reciprocated (strategic sharing) or whether friendship and strategic reciprocity are independent factors in predicting children's sharing. If the former is the case, children should prefer their friend relatively more in a situation where the friend can reciprocate than in a situation without the possibility for reciprocity. In two experiments, 3- and 5-year-old participants (N = 270) could distribute stickers between themselves and three recipients: a friend, a child who would join the kindergarten group the next day, and a stranger. Half of the children were led to believe that their generosity could be reciprocated, and the other half were not. In Experiment 1, this was implemented by anonymous and nonanonymous sharing. In Experiment 2, the possibility of reciprocity or lack thereof was explicitly mentioned. The results show that participants across both age groups shared more resources with their friend than with less familiar recipients. Potential reciprocity affected 5-year-olds' sharing but not 3-year-olds' sharing-but only if reciprocity was explicitly mentioned (Experiment 2). Importantly, the preference for the friend was independent of the possibility to be reciprocated for all children. The current study shows that friendship and strategic reciprocity are relevant but probably largely independent factors for children's sharing. That is, the preference to share with friends cannot be reduced to strategic considerations.

Tolerance, Dissenting Beliefs, and Cultural Diversity

Divergent cultural, religious, and ideological beliefs and practices are often challenging to contemplate and difficult to accept when they conflict with an individual’s own convictions and way of life. The recognition that children and adolescents grow up in an increasingly diverse world has led to a general interest in fostering tolerance. In this article, we discuss three central questions on tolerance and related research. First, we consider age‐related patterns of responses toward tolerance of diversity and whether they depend on the type of dissenting beliefs and practices children are asked to tolerate. Second, we focus on how and why children are asked to be tolerant. Third, we discuss the boundaries of tolerance—the reasons and conditions that make tolerance less likely. Overall, we conclude that tolerance and intolerance can occur at all ages and depend on what, how, why, and when individuals are asked to tolerate belief discrepancy and dissenting practices.

Mentalising Moderates the Link between Autism Traits and Current Gender Dysphoric Features in Primarily Non-autistic, Cisgender Individuals

The co-occurrence between autism and gender dysphoria has received much attention recently. We found that, among 101 adults from the general population number of autism traits, as measured using the autism-spectrum quotient was associated significantly with recalled and current gender dysphoric traits. Furthermore, performance on an objective measure of mentalising, such as the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test was associated with current gender dysphoric traits, but most importantly it moderated the relation between number of autism traits and number of current gender dysphoric traits, such that the association was significant only when mentalising ability was relatively low. Results suggest mentalising may represent a contributing factor to the relation between autism and gender dysphoric traits in the general population.

Merit overrules theory of mind when young children share resources with others

Non-windfall approaches to sharing demonstrate pre-schoolers’ sensitivity to merit-based distributions of resources. However, such studies have not considered (1) whether epistemic aspects of task performance, such as the relative accuracy of a co-worker, influences pre-schoolers’ rates of sharing; and (2) how children’s emerging social understanding may impact resource allocations in high- and low-merit situations. These issues are of theoretical importance as they may provide new information about the scope of pre-schooler’s merit-based sharing behaviours. Moreover, as social understanding has been related to both increases and decreases in pre-schoolers’ levels of sharing, providing a merit-based assessment of this relationship would allow for a concurrent assessment of recent conflicting findings. In this study, three- and four-year-olds (N = 131) participated in an unexpected transfer task which was followed by a resource generation picture card naming task with a reliable or unreliable (high- or low-merit) co-worker (a hand puppet). The results showed that children engage in more generous rates of sharing with a high-merit co-worker. This suggests that merit-based sharing is apparent in young children and extends to epistemic aspects of task performance. However, such sharing was constrained by a self-serving bias. Finally, we were not able to detect an effect of children’s performance on the false belief task on sharing behaviours in the high- or low-merit trials, suggesting that these behaviours may not be modulated by social understanding during early childhood.

Lying, negligence, or lack of knowledge? Children's intention-based moral reasoning about resource claims

In a hidden inequality context, resource allocators and resource recipients are unaware that an unknowingly advantaged recipient possesses resources. The present study presented children aged 3-13 years (N = 121) with a hidden inequality vignette involving an accidental transgression in which one resource claimant, who unknowingly possessed more resources than another claimant, made an "unintentional false claim" to resources. This unintentional false claim resulted in depriving another recipient of needed resources. Results revealed that children's ability to accurately identify the claimant's intentions was related to how they evaluated and reasoned about resource claims, a previously understudied aspect of resource allocation contexts. Children's attributions of intentions to the accidental transgressor mediated the relationship between age and evaluations of the accidental transgression and the relationship between age and assignment of punishment to the accidental transgressor. With age, children who negatively evaluated the unintentional false claim shifted from reasoning about lying to a focus on negligence on the part of the unintentional false claimant. This shift reflects an increasing understanding of the accidental transgressor's benign intentions. These findings highlight how mental state knowledge and moral reasoning inform children's comprehension of resource allocation contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Young Children's Theory of Mind Predicts More Sharing With Friends Over Time

Children (predominantly white and middle class) between 3 and 6 years (M = 55.12 months, N = 145 at Time 1, N = 102 at Time 2) participated in the prosocial choice test at two time points approximately 10 months apart. Children could share with strangers, close friends, nonfriends, and in a control, no recipient condition. Children shared more rewards with friends over time. Age interacted with recipient type such that older children had a higher probability of prosocial allocations toward friends and strangers compared to younger children. Theory of mind (ToM) predicted more prosocial allocations to friends over time, and the youngest children with higher ToM scores showed the largest increase in sharing with friends over time.