When Helping Hurts: Children Think Groups That Receive Help Are Less Smart

Children perpetuate competence-based inequality when they help peers

Exchanges of help between children are common and often have positive consequences. But not all help is equally beneficial, for example because some help does not provide an opportunity to practice and develop skills. Here I examine whether young children might perpetuate competence-based inequality by providing incompetent peers with less opportunity to practice and improve their skills compared to competent peers. Study 1 (N = 253, 6-9 years) shows that young children understand not all help is equally beneficial: Children think that peers who receive empowerment (hints) vs. non-empowerment (correct answers) help can learn more. Study 2 (N = 80) and 3 (N = 41) then assessed children's (7-9 years) actual helping behavior in a lab-based experiment. Through a cover story, participants were introduced to two unknown, same-age children whom they later overheard were either good or not good at solving puzzles (Study 2) or math (Study 3). Subsequently, participants got to help both of them with a puzzle-quiz (Study 2) or a math-quiz (Study 3) by providing either empowerment or non-empowerment when they asked for help. Across both studies, children were more likely to provide empowerment help to competent peers, and non-empowerment help to incompetent peers. This work suggests that when young children perceive differences in competence (e.g., based on stereotypes), they contribute to maintaining the status quo by providing the most vulnerable students, that would profit the most from improving their skills, less opportunity to do so.

"You did incredibly well!": teachers' inflated praise can make children from low-SES backgrounds seem less smart (but more hardworking)

Can teachers' inflated praise make children from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds seem less smart? We conducted two preregistered experiments to address this question. We used hypothetical scenarios to ensure experimental control. An experiment with primary school teachers (N = 106, ages 21-63) showed that when a child from a low-SES (vs. high-SES) background succeeded in school, teachers attributed this success more to hard work and delivered more inflated praise (e.g., "You did incredibly well!") but less modest praise (e.g., "You did well!"). An experiment with primary school children (N = 63, ages 10-13) showed that when children learned that another child received inflated praise (while an equally performing classmate received modest praise or no praise), they perceived this child as less smart but more hardworking. These studies provide converging evidence that teachers' inflated praise, although well-intentioned, can make children from low-SES backgrounds seem less smart, thereby reinforcing negative stereotypes about these children's academic abilities.

Children seek help based on how others learn

Do children consider how others learned when seeking help? Across three experiments, German children (N = 536 3-to-8 year olds, 49% female, majority White, tested 2017-2019) preferred to learn from successful active learners selectively by context: They sought help solving a problem from a learner who had independently discovered the solution to a previous problem over those who had learned through instruction or observation, but only when the current problem was novel, yet related, to the learners' problem (Experiment 1). Older, but not younger, children preferred the active learner even when she was offered help (Experiment 2), though only when her discovery was deliberate (Experiment 3). Although a preference to learn from successful active learners emerges early, a genuine appreciation for process beyond outcome increases across childhood.

Developmental origins of anti-Black bias in White children in the United States: Exposure to and beliefs about racial inequality

Anti-Black racism remains a pervasive crisis in the United States. Racist social systems reinforce racial inequalities and perpetuate prejudicial beliefs. These beliefs emerge in childhood, are difficult to change once entrenched in adolescence and adulthood, and lead people to support policies that further reinforce racist systems. Therefore, it is important to identify what leads children to form prejudicial beliefs and biases and what steps can be taken to preempt their development. This study examined how children's exposure to and beliefs about racial inequalities predicted anti-Black biases in a sample of 646 White children (4 to 8 years) living across the United States. We found that for children with more exposure to racial inequality in their daily lives, those who believed that racial inequalities were caused by intrinsic differences between people were more likely to hold racial biases, whereas those who recognized the extrinsic factors underlying racial inequalities held more egalitarian attitudes. Grounded in constructivist theories in developmental science, these results are consistent with the possibility that racial biases emerge in part from the explanatory beliefs that children construct to understand the racial inequalities they see in the world around them.

Children's thinking about group-based social hierarchies

Wealth, power, and status are distributed unevenly across social groups. A surge of recent research reveals that people being recognizing, representing, and reasoning about group-based patterns of inequity during the first years of life. We first synthesize recent research on what children learn about group-based social hierarchies as well as how this learning occurs. We then discuss how children not only learn about societal structures but become active participants in them. Studying the origins and development of children's thoughts and behavior regarding group-based social hierarchies provides valuable insight into how systems of inequity are perpetuated across generations and how intergroup biases related to wealth, power, and status may be mitigated and reshaped early in development.

Immigrant Youth Resilience: Theoretical Considerations, Empirical Developments, and Future Directions

Resilient adaptation among immigrant youth provides the foundation for healthy and productive adult lives. Great diversity is observed in their adaptation. This diversity has been studied during the past decade from different angles and intellectual traditions. However, the results are disconnected. In this paper, first, we present a resilience conceptual model for understanding immigrant youth adaptation. We argue that its concepts and principles allow us to best pull together what is known and discover what is still unknown. Together with narrower topic-specific conceptual models, it can guide the formulation of hypotheses regarding immigrant youth resilience. Second, we examine comparatively, through the lens of this conceptual model, results of a content analysis on the abstracts of studies on individual differences in immigrant youth adaptation, conducted during the past decade in North American and European countries. Finally, we discuss the meaning of acculturation-related terms which are often used in an inconsistent way.

Beliefs about social norms and racial inequalities predict variation in the early development of racial bias

Racism remains a pervasive force around the world with widespread and well documented harmful consequences for members of marginalized racial groups. The psychological biases that maintain structural and interpersonal racism begin to emerge in early childhood, but with considerable individual variation-some children develop more racial bias than others. The present study (N = 116; 4-year-old children) provides novel insights into the developmental mechanisms underlying the emergence of racial bias by longitudinally documenting how two psychological processes-normative beliefs about interracial friendships and explanatory beliefs about racial inequalities-developmentally predict the emergence of pro-White/anti-Black racial bias during early childhood. In a 6-month, three-wave, longitudinal study, we found that 4-year-old children's beliefs that their parents and peers do not value interracial friendships predicted increased racial bias in and across time and that children's endorsement of essentialist over extrinsic explanations for racial inequalities predicted the developmental trajectory of racial bias over time. These findings suggest that children's foundational beliefs about the social world developmentally predict the emergence of racial bias in early childhood and speak to the importance of early and persistent intervention efforts targeting children's normative beliefs about interracial friendships and explanatory beliefs about racial inequalities.

Moral Psychology as a Necessary Bridge Between Social Cognition and Law

Coordinating competing interests can be difficult. Because law regulates human behavior, it is a candidate mechanism for creating coordination in the face of societal disagreement. We argue that findings from moral psychology are necessary to understand why law can effectively resolve co-occurring conflicts related to punishment and group membership. First, we discuss heterogeneity in punitive thought, focusing on punishment within the United States legal system. Though the law exerts a weak influence on punitive ideologies before punishment occurs, we argue that it effectively coordinates perceptions of individuals who have already been punished. Next, we discuss intergroup conflict, which often co-occurs with disagreements related to punishment and represents a related domain where coordination can be difficult to achieve. Here, we underscore how insights from moral psychology can promote equality via the law. These examples demonstrate how contributions from moral psychology are necessary to understand the connection between social cognition and law.