New work! Kristin Shutts and I review how help can in some cases backfire and lead to detriments in children’s self-views, views of others, and motivation, especially when help is distributed unequally. Check it out here (open access!): journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Excited to share a new paper in Current Directions on the theme of merging in close relationships, with @emmamcgorray.bsky.social, @erinhughes.bsky.social , and @abdoe.bsky.social! In the paper, we discuss merging in the domains of selves, goals, processing, and reality. tinyurl.com/ynbedzys (1/4)

📣 new paper! people use some categories to generalize (e.g., we generalize something we learn about one tiger 🐯 to other tigers 🐅), but not others (e.g., we don't generalize from one pedestrian 🚶 to other pedestrians 🚶‍♂️). how do people learn what categories allow for generalization? 🧵

I and my lab are happy to be at #cogsci2025! Here's a shortcut to find work from the fabulous folks in my lab (and me) 😄

The SoCal Lab is headed to #cogsci2025 this week! Here's where you can find us:

A new piece - well, almost a whole book! - by our team, reflecting more than a decade of work.

New preprint! Led by Bill Pepe, with @brandonwoo.bsky.social and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social. We asked if infants think helping and hindering stem from actors' dispositions (i.e. good/nice v bad/mean) or their social relationships, by testing expectations for future behavior: osf.io/preprints/ps...

⭐ Out now in Developmental Science ⭐ "Sounds of Hidden Agents: The development of causal reasoning about musical sounds" (by Minju Kim and me) causal reasoning, music/auditory cognition, event reconstruction, kids' integration of information... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

I'm hiring a full-time #labmanager for my new Lab for Infant Learning and Cognition (LILAC) at UCSB! The start date is flexible, but could be as early as August 1, 2025. Application review begins July 17th and will continue until the position is filled 👶🪴 recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF02992 #academicjobs

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Excited that this paper is finally out (in collaboration with @zoeliberman.bsky.social @saraburke.bsky.social & Brenda Major) in PSPB! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New paper with past honors student Vanessa Chao and @zoeliberman.bsky.social in press at JECP: “Children can consider social relationships when evaluating liars” By the early elementary school years, people judge it as worse and meaner for a friend (vs. classmate) to lie. doi.org/10.1016/j.je...

1. New paper first-authored by former post-doc Young-eun Lee (currently at MIT with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social) now in press at JECP! More info in thread below, full text here: columbiasamclab.weebly.com/uploads/5/9/.... 🧪 #PsychSciSky #SocialPsyc #DevPsyc #CogPsyc @socphilpsych.bsky.social

New paper from Laura Lewis and Jan Engelmann et al. (including me) with a clever new method. Chimps and kids will forgo reward to get a chance to look at social interactions royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

🥳🥳 New paper in @nathumbehav.nature.com: “When development constricts our moral circle." Contrary to popular belief, younger kids may start out with broader moral circles than older ones. Check it out here 👉 rdcu.be/eoaSe w/ @mattiwilks.bsky.social @karrineldner.bsky.social & Lucius Caviola

NSF Physics was cut by 85%, basically wiping out most of its capacity for supporting research. NSF Astronomy was cut by 53% Undergrad education was cut by 71% and research on learning by 79% Graduate education was cut by 100% to ZERO. #GiftLink ⚛️🔭 www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

UC San Diego Psychology hosted the first Southern California Meeting for Investigations in Developmental Science (SoCal MInDS) this Saturday. We were joined by wonderful folks from the southernmost UC campuses, SDSU, CSULA, Occidental College, and USC.

If you are attending #CogSci2025 I hope you will consider attending our pre-conference workshop on July 29 - "Putting it Together: Interactions Between Domains of Cognition" sites.google.com/view/cogsci2...

bit of good news: approved technical staff position! link below. please be in touch if this matches your skills & interests! drive.google.com/file/d/16J2J... (hr listing posted harvard-internal now; external soon, per guidelines), happy for ?s & plan on quick turnaround! #CogSciSky #PsychSciSky 🐦🐦

New preprint! Despite ongoing efforts to combat gender bias in education, our work reveals a striking and under-explored challenge: By the time children enter elementary school, children already expect adults to hold gender stereotypes and approve when adults act on them. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Wanted to share a handy little resource with you all (especially those in dev psych) — my lab & I made a "journal submission cheat sheet" that summarizes article types, word limits, & other requirements for the journals we typically submit to. Link below 👇🏼 docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

#SRCD25, I and my lab are here! Come see @rtompkins.bsky.social on social reasoning from sleep arrangements-Th 10-11:20am talk 3, room 200B; R Santiago on how children use objects’ placements to learn about people-Fri 10:50 Poster 90; & K Han on the origins of dance in infancy-Sat 10:30, Poster 52!

I'm sad to miss #SRCD2025 but @rtompkins.bsky.social is there and one of his presentations is on work we've been doing together: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Ever wonder what children think about caregivers who stop kids from doing dangerous things? Go to his talk (Thurs 11:50 am session) to find out!

Check out our symposium on *parents' lay theories of cognitive development* at #SRCD2025! Ft. work by @reutshachnai.bsky.social, @julia-a-leonard.bsky.social, @dominicgibson.bsky.social, and yours truly, discussed by @andrewshtulman.bsky.social !

Come check out our symposium at #SRCD2025: "Navigating social groups and relationships"! There'll be talks by Sarah Ramsey, Rongzhi Liu, @rtompkins.bsky.social, and me. Thursday at 10 am.

Come check out the UChicago Social Kids Lab (PIs Katherine Kinzler and Alex Shaw) at #SRCD2025. My labmates have lots of exciting projects I can't wait to watch them present.

How do adopted and donor-conceicved kids reason about nature vs. nurture? They hold *reduced* genetic-essentialist beliefs relative to traditionally-conceived kids, according to our new paper (in press at Dev Psych)! I’m really proud of this one. A🧵… osf.io/preprints/ps...

New Peekbank preprint! A snapshot of what we've learned so far about developmental change in word recognition using the large-scale repository of infant eyetracking data we've been building (~ 2000 infants; ~3500 individual test sessions)

Do kids prefer to play with helpers? Our paper on children's trait attribution and partner choice is out! doi.org/10.1111/cdev... We wanted to know if kids, after observing other agents' behaviors, spontaneously (!) interpret them in terms of traits and choose cooperation partners accordingly. 🧵...

I am delighted to announce my student Beyza Cifti's first publication, with me and Gergely Csibra, out today in Royal Society Open Science! (1/6) royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.... #CogSci #PsychSci #DevPsych

The last chapter of my dissertation is out now in Child Development! 🎉 OA: srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/KEAHK8...

Interested in children's developing understanding of linguistic register? Check out a new paper-- led by past undergraduate lab member, Ishaan Ambrish (currently working with Ariel Starr at UW) and grad student @shreyasodhi.bsky.social

Excited to share a new paper on children's third-party punishment across societies. This was a big collaborative effort and I'm so grateful to my wonderful co-authors for their contributions to this project. Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s44... Blog: communities.springernature.com/posts/childr...

Pepe & Powell (2025): 8- & 9-month-old infants expect imitators to help the social partner they imitated but not a novel partner. This shows infants use social imitation to infer relationships more readily than broad prosocial dispositions #DevPsySky #infancypapers doi.org/10.1111/infa...

Overparenting can hold kids back—but our research shows that framing tasks as learning opportunities helps parents step back and foster kids' independence! ✨ Read more in our latest Psychology Today piece: www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/deve... @julia-a-leonard.bsky.social @mika-asaba.bsky.social

I wrote a piece for @sciam.bsky.social about why White parents should be talking to their kids about race and racism. It was so great to work with @megha.bsky.social on this piece! Please share! www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-...

🎉 I'm hiring a lab manager to start August 2025 and help build my lab at Lehigh. Submit a CV, cover letter, transcript, and 2 reference contacts by March 14th. The full job description is linked below. Please share with any students or mentees who might be interested! #devpsy tinyurl.com/33vtvy79

I think some people hear “grants” and think that without them, scientists and government workers just have less stuff to play with at work. But grants fund salaries for students, academics, researchers, and people who work in all areas of public service. “Pausing” grants means people don’t eat.

🎉Postdoc Alert! I am recruiting a postdoc to start Summer 2025 in the Mind & Morality Lab at Brown. If you're interested, please send a CV, cover letter, and names of at least two references to [email protected] by 2/28. If you have questions, don't hesitate to reach out!

New paper! @katiemcauliffe.bsky.social + @andreicimpian.bsky.social Men tend to ask for higher salaries and more promotions for themselves than do women. We examined kids' beliefs about negotiation and how they may contribute to developing gender differences in negotiation doi.org/10.1037/dev0...

www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/ai-... — Alison Gopnik

Absolutely ecstatic to share that I’ll be joining Lehigh University as an Assistant Professor in Psychology this July! ✨ I am so excited to build my own lab and join such an amazing department with the best colleagues. It really is a dream come true 💫 [1/2]

Out now! @drbarner.bsky.social & I find that Hindi kids learn yesterday & tomorrow earlier than English kids, despite having only word 'kal' to reference both the past and future. We argue that kids rely on tense info (over associations w/ events) to learn. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New paper out from our NSF Collaborative grant testing the widely used minimal group paradigm across multiple racial groups in the US! Overall, minimal group effects hold, but exploratory analyses show stronger effects with older kids and White kids. #psychology www.sciencedirect.com/science/auth...

We wrote a paper on how we think language interacts with Theory of Mind, why the connection is tricky to find experimentally, and what this means for pragmatics: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Interested in how children think about immigrants? 🚨 New work led by @shreyasodhi.bsky.social 🚨 We find that children expect immigrants to have a dual identity--to be similar to both people from their host and heritage cultures #devpsych srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Coming soon: CASBS research affiliate @alisongopnik.bsky.social curates the Winter 2025 issue of Dædalus, the publication of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, on: THE SOCIAL SCIENCE OF CAREGIVING It's inspired by a CASBS project Alison leads. Check out this project overview: bit.ly/3Z5nsAx

SPP 2025 will be at Cornell, June 18-21!