"A 'Cool' Kid Wears a Brand, and Everyone's following Him" Hierarchal Social Status in Preadolescence: A New Developmental Perspective

Inequality in hierarchical social status, especially among socially excluded children, profoundly affects preadolescents. Historically viewed through a lens of psychopathology and moral deficiencies, it challenges the education system's approaches and interventions. This article introduces a developmental perspective, highlighting the hierarchical social status' role in shaping classroom cohesion, strength, and distinctiveness. This study's phenomenological, qualitative methodology aimed to gain preliminary insight into the children's perspectives. Drawing from 12 focus group discussions involving 140 latency-age (grade 5) children in Israel, it uniquely reveals the dynamic nature of hierarchical social status influenced by children's connections with the group. This dynamism promotes group unity, strengthens bonds, and prioritizes collective concerns, contributing to the development of a "social self" in the latency phase. Beyond theory, this study proposes innovative interventions to address social status disparities.

Evaluative Deflation, Social Expectations, and the Zone of Moral Indifference

Acts that are considered undesirable standardly violate our expectations. In contrast, acts that count as morally desirable can either meet our expectations or exceed them. The zone in which an act can be morally desirable yet not exceed our expectations is what we call the zone of moral indifference, and it has so far been neglected. In this paper, we show that people can use positive terms in a deflated manner to refer to actions in the zone of moral indifference, whereas negative terms cannot be so interpreted.

Rethinking Norm Psychology

Norms permeate human life. Most of people's activities can be characterized by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden-rules that are crucial in making people hyper-cooperative animals. In this article, I examine the current cognitive-evolutionary account of "norm psychology" and propose an alternative that is better supported by evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. The incumbent theory focuses on rules and claims that humans genetically inherit cognitive and motivational mechanisms specialized for processing these rules. The cultural-evolutionary alternative defines normativity in relation to behavior-compliance, enforcement, and commentary-and suggests that it depends on implicit and explicit processes. The implicit processes are genetically inherited and domain-general; rather than being specialized for normativity, they do many jobs in many species. The explicit processes are culturally inherited and domain-specific; they are constructed from mentalizing and reasoning by social interaction in childhood. The cultural-evolutionary, or "cognitive gadget," perspective suggests that people alive today-parents, educators, elders, politicians, lawyers-have more responsibility for sustaining normativity than the nativist view implies. People's actions not only shape and transmit the rules, but they also create in each new generation mental processes that can grasp the rules and put them into action.

Condemned or valued: Young children evaluate nonconformity based on nonconformists' group orientations

Nonconformity--the act of deviating from established norms and expectations of one's group--is often evaluated negatively, despite its potential benefits for society. Three preregistered studies (N = 153) examined how nonconformists' group orientations (attitudes and intentions toward ingroup and outgroups) might affect 4-6-year-olds' evaluations of nonconformity in intergroup situations. Study 1 examined children's default beliefs of nonconformists' group attitudes toward ingroup and outgroup. We found that children expected nonconformists to hold more positive attitudes toward their outgroup than toward their ingroup, and this expectation predicted their disapproval of nonconformity. In Study 2, however, when nonconformity was explicitly motivated by positive intentions toward the ingroup rather than toward the outgroup, children were more accepting of nonconformity. Study 3 found that among nonconformists with different types of group orientations (positive toward the outgroup, ingroup or both group), young children evaluated the most positively nonconformists who bring the ingroup and the outgroup together. Collectively, these findings suggest that children evaluate nonconformity based on nonconformists' group orientations, illuminating one mechanism for how nonconformity could be more socially accepted and valued.

The common effect of value on prioritized memory and category representation

The way we represent categories depends on both the frequency and value of the members of that category. Thus, for instance, prototype representations can be impacted by both information about what is statistically frequent and judgments about what is valuable. Notably, recent research on memory suggests that prioritized memory is also influenced by both statistical frequency and value judgments. Although work on conceptual representation and work on prioritized memory have so far proceeded almost entirely independently, the patterns of existing findings provide evidence for a link between these two phenomena. In particular, these patterns provide evidence for the hypothesis that the impact of value on conceptual representation arises from its co-dependent relationship with prioritized memory.

Rational learners and parochial norms

Parochial norms are narrow in social scope, meaning they apply to certain groups but not to others. Accounts of norm acquisition typically invoke tribal biases: from an early age, people assume a group's behavioral regularities are prescribed and bounded by mere group membership. However, another possibility is rational learning: given the available evidence, people infer the social scope of norms in statistically appropriate ways. With this paper, we introduce a rational learning account of parochial norm acquisition and test a unique prediction that it makes. In one study with adults (N = 480) and one study with children ages 5- to 8-years-old (N = 120), participants viewed violations of a novel rule sampled from one of two unfamiliar social groups. We found that adults judgments of social scope - whether the rule applied only to the sampled group (parochial scope), or other groups (inclusive scope) - were appropriately sensitive to the relevant features of their statistical evidence (Study 1). In children (Study 2) we found an age difference: 7- to 8-year-olds used statistical evidence to infer that norms were parochial or inclusive, whereas 5- to 6-year olds were overall inclusive regardless of statistical evidence. A Bayesian analysis shows a possible inclusivity bias: adults and children inferred inclusive rules more frequently than predicted by a naïve Bayesian model with unbiased priors. This work highlights that tribalist biases in social cognition are not necessary to explain the acquisition of parochial norms.

Exploring Intergroup Peer Exclusion: Validation of the Latency Social-Psychological Developmental Questionnaire (LSPD)

Intergroup peer exclusion has been studied mainly from a pathological aspect. Currently, methods of diagnosis and treatment focus on this pathological point of view. Qualitative research has revealed that social intergroup peer exclusion has a role in the developmental task of the latency stage. The study’s main aim was to develop and validate a quick and easy quantitative questionnaire for use in a school setting that reflects the social developmental variables exposed in previous qualitative research. The 32-item Latency Social-Psychological Developmental questionnaire (LSPD) and the Loneliness and Social Dissatisfaction Questionnaire were administered to 20 Grade 4 and Grade 5 classes at four co-ed public elementary schools (N = 373 participants). Factor analysis revealed six developmental factors, and correlations were found between these factors and loneliness. The LSPD is a tool for assessing latency stage development among children who experienced exclusion as well as the developmental status of the entire class. The LSPD can assist in identifying specific development areas to focus on in treatment and intervention.

Messaging about descriptive and injunctive norms can promote honesty in young children

This research examined the effectiveness of using norms to promote honesty. Participants were Han Chinese children (N = 568, 50.4% male, 3.24 to 6.00 years, collected 2020-2022). Relative to children in a control condition, children in Study 1 were more likely to confess to having cheated in a game after being presented with a descriptive norm indicating that confessions are typical, or an injunctive norm indicating that most other children approve of confessing. Study 2 showed that this finding was not due to a methodological artifact, and Study 3 replicated the effect in a context in which the norm information was conveyed by someone other than the experimenter. The findings suggest that messages about social norms can influence children's honesty.

Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross-cultural principles of law? In a between-subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross-culturally and -linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice.

Categories convey prescriptive information across domains and development

Young children display a pervasive bias to assume that what they observe in the world reflects how things are supposed to be. The current studies examined the nature of this bias by testing whether it reflects a particular form of reasoning about human social behaviors or a more general feature of category representations. Children aged 4 to 9 years and adults (N = 747) evaluated instances of nonconformity among members of novel biological and human social kinds. Children held prescriptive expectations for both animal and human categories; in both cases, they said it was wrong for a category member to engage in category-atypical behavior. These prescriptive judgments about categories depended on the extent to which people saw the pictured individual examples as representative of coherent categories. Thus, early prescriptive judgments appear to rely on the interplay between general conceptual biases and domain-specific beliefs about category structure.

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.

How (many) descriptive claims about political polarization exacerbate polarization

Recently, researchers and reporters have made a wide range of claims about the distribution, nature, and societal impact of political polarization. Here I offer reasons to believe that even when they are correct and prima facie merely descriptive, many of these claims have the highly negative side effect of increasing political polarization. This is because of the interplay of two factors that have so far been neglected in the work on political polarization, namely that (1) people tend to conform to descriptive norms (i.e., norms capturing [perceptions of] what others commonly do, think, or feel), and that (2) claims about political polarization often convey such norms. Many of these claims thus incline people to behave, cognize, and be affectively disposed in ways that contribute to social division. But there is a silver lining. People’s tendency to conform to descriptive norms also provides the basis for developing new, experimentally testable strategies for counteracting political polarization. I outline three.

Should Individuals Think Like Their Group? A Descriptive-to-Prescriptive Tendency Toward Group-Based Beliefs

Across three pre-registered studies with children (ages 4-9) and adults (N = 303), we examined whether how a group is predicted evaluations of how group members should be (i.e., a descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency), under conditions in which the descriptive group norms entailed beliefs that were fact-based (Study 1), opinion-based (Study 2), and ideology-based (Study 3). Overall, participants tended to disapprove of individuals with beliefs that differed from their group, but the extent of this tendency varied across development and as a function of the belief under consideration (e.g., younger children did not show a descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency in the context of facts and ideologies, suggesting that they prioritized truth over group norms). Implications for normative reasoning and ideological polarization are discussed.