PSYC 216 EXAM 2

What are the four different types of mental states presented in class?  

-motivational

-epistemic

-countermactionual

-emotional

motivatonal state

What motivates the agent to act 

• Preferences, desires, goals: what do you like and what do you want to achieve 

epistemic state

What the agent does/does not know 

• Facts of the world: sky is blue 

counterfactual states

False information the agent beliefs 

•  False beliefs about the world - that are not true 

-professor doesn’t know what’s on our night stand 

emotional state

What the agent feels 

• Happiness, sadness, fear, relief 

one-object and two-object

 

• Recognize if someone has a preference if it’s availble to them 

• Two object: person grabs same object over again: person picks bear over ball 

-switch location and grab old-object in new location, normal, suprised when pick up the ball but located in the bear position 

 

One object: person chooses the bear, but no ball, move bear and add a ball, when they pick up the ball there’s o difference 

-no epectation because didn’t have the ball to compare too 

 

*have general idea of ages in the studies 

-sequence in which things develop 

agent detour task

• Focuses on goals, Can infants track whether on not things have a goal 

-can the goal be attributed in an efficent manner 

• Looking at the different pulsing ball, has to jump over barrier, the goal is to get over to the dark circle 

• When removed the barrier what do infants think ball will do? Will it jump over or go straight there 

-should be surprised when the ball jumps over and are suprised on “old action” instead of straight forward 

-goal that the ball wanted to jump over and is now taking correct approach 

imitation task

 

• Imitation Task: at 14 months 

-Turning on a light with one’s forehead 

-2 Conditions: Hands occupied or Hands free 

With hands free they think maybe theres something special and need to turn on with head. When turn on with no hands it’s because they have no other option 

Results: 

Do toddlers turn on the light with their heads?  Hands occupied: No (only 21%)  Hands free: Yes (69%) 

• Infants (14 months)… are inferring the idea 

-Expect others to pursue their goals efficiently - she wants to turn on the light with her head 

- Use situational constraints to explain away odd behaviors - I’m going to do the same because she wanted to turn the light on with her head so I want to do the same 

•  Make inferences about how THEY should act based on others’ mental state -> actions 

Describe the knowledge and ignorance conditions of the experiment testing infants’ epistemic states. What are the key findings and what can we conclude from it? Based on the key findings, are infants egocentric? 

Epistemic state: What an agent does / does not know 

• Luo and Baillargeon (2007) worked with12 month olds using the violation of expectation method with 2 conditions: Transparent (knowledge) and Opaque (ignorant) 

 

Interpretation 

Transparent (Knowledge) Condition: 

• When infants know the agent knows about both options, they infer a 

preference 

• … replication of the two-object preference task 

Opaque (Ignorance) Condition: 

• When infants know the agent DOES NOT KNOW about both options, they 

do not infer a preference 

• … replication of the one-object preference task results 

Key point: 

• Infants are not egocentric: They can realize when they have knowledge that other people don’t 

 

Further Results: Knowledge Awareness 

Replicated with infant pointing 

• Liszkowski et al. (2008) 

• 12-month-olds 

Results 

• Reliably more points in ignorance than knowledge condition 

Knowledge: they don’t know where cookie is but if they have 

Ignorance: they don’t know where it is so person points it out because they think they know 

Key point: 

• Infants recognize when they have knowledge someone else doesn’t have and use that knowledge to inform their actions and predict behavior. They keep track of an agent’s epistemic states of what they know vs. what they don’t know

 

false belief / counterfactual state

False information the agent beliefs: when you know someone else thinks something incorrect 

-when someone pulls the chair out from under you without you knowing 

Onishi & Baillargeon (2005) study about false belief. What are the key findings and what can we conclude from it regarding infants’ understanding of false beliefs? 

* put watermelon in box and look for it later 

-put into green box and they reach to green box 

 VOE-FB Task 

Conditions (4 total) 

• 2 True-Belief 

• 2 False-Belief** 

-yellow condition, goes from green box to yellow 

-secretly move watermelon into the green box (we know it’s in green box but person thinks it’s in yellow since they didn’t see) 

-want to see which is surprising to infants, if they use their own understanding  

Results 

• In each condition, infants expected the agent to act in accordance with her belief about the toy’s location 

- regardless of whether it was true or false 

Key point: 

• By 15-months, infants recognize that others can hold counterfactual beliefs. 

Infants… Have an understanding of others’ mental states, Use that understanding when forming expectations about others, Use that understanding when guiding their own actions 

Describe the Sally Ann task. What is the task designed to study? What is the key finding from this task? 

False Belief Task 

• Sally has a marble and puts it into basket for later and sally goes outside 

-sally gone, ann takes it out of basket and puts it into box 

Results - Before 4 years old… 

• Children FAIL (point to box where the marble actually is) 

• Don’t understand that Sally will falsely believe her marble is still in the basket. 

After 4 years old… 

• Children PASS (point to basket where Sally left the marble) 

• Recognize that Sally holds a false-belief about the marble’s location and expect her to act based on that false-belief. 

Many similar tasks, replicated many times across cultures 

• Meta-analysis: Wellman et al. (2001) 

Review the findings from the Wellman & Liu (2004) meta-analysis. What is the order in which children passed the different ToM tasks and the overall ages when this development occurs?  

1. Diverse Desires Beliefs 2. Diverse Beliefs Knowledge 3. Knowledge Access 4. Contents False-Belief 

5. Location False-Belief Emotions 6. Belief Emotion 7. Real-Apparent Emotion 

Diverse Desires: 

• If child likes cookies 

• If person likes carrots the child still thinks they like cookies 

Results (Wellman & Liu, 2004) 

Children pass ToM tasks in a specific order 

1. Diverse Desires (~2.5 years) 

2. Diverse Beliefs (~3 years) 

3. Knowledge Access (~3.5 years) 

4. Contents False-Belief (~4 years) 

5. Explicit/Location False-Belief (~4 years) 

6. Belief Emotion (~5 years) 

7. Real-Apparent Emotion (~5.5 years) 

Results replicated with 1000’s of children from across the globe 

How is children’s ToM related to their lying behavior? What would training children on ToM tasks do to their lying? (Hint: Ding et al., 2015). Verbal ToM tasks predict lying behaviors 

-the idea that infants have full robust theory of mind that they don’t need training to lead to other types of behaviors like lying 

Ding et al., 2015 

• 42 children (Mage = 3.08 years) 

• Training Study 

Verbal ToM tasks predict lying behaviors 

Children were: 

1. Screened for: lying behavior and their of mind 

• Deceptive abilities, ToM, (& Executive Functioning, IQ) 

2. Trained on: 

• Experimental: Standard ToM tasks; Mental state stories they get trained on, go through the logic  

• Control: Piagetian conservation tasks (physical reasoning) 

3. Assessed on: 

1. ToM and deceptive abilities (for 6 consecutive days): their results will go up and will wait a month to see what happens 

2. Deceptive abilities (1 month delay) 

 

Verbal ToM tasks predict lying behaviors 

Results: 

• Children scored higher on the ToM and deception measures after training. 

Implications: 

• If children only failed because of language/task difficulty, unclear why training would increase lying on a separate task 

-should tell experimenter is in other box to get stickers 

three theoretical view on TOM

• fundamental-change

• processing load

• developing system account

fundamental-change

experiential things that shape when they develop different capacities, kids are getting better at lannguage 

process load

infants are incorrect, highly controlled tasks, shared neural systems

developing system account

weaves the previous two together, infants get stronger in practicing ToM 

what are the three main ways of social learning

• trial and error learning

• independent invention and discovery

• social learning

trial and error learning

try and try again, fail, and then develop 

• Learning through conditioning, Punishment/Reinforcement, Positive/Negative 

  • Little Albert 

independent invention and discovery

own investigation and figure out what’s going on 

 

• Jean Piaget believed Children as little scientists 

• Observe, Predict, Test: test to see how parents respond e.g. bite mom and want to see how dad responds when baby bites mom, Revise 

social learning

learning from other people

 

• Direct instruction: i tell you something and you listen 

• Vicarious Reinforcement 

observational learning

learn by watching other people, process what they’re doing

• imitation, social norms, vicarious reinforcment

imitation

orgins of social learning

social norms

how we learn the “rules” of social world

vicarious reinforcement

 

• Learning from someone else's reward/punishment 

-response that we learn from other people 

-bobo doll experiment: good job you hit the doll or bad you shouldn’t, when they got rewarded children then hit the doll 

what is imitation and what are the benefits of imitation for development

Observing and copying others 

Benefits 

• Flexible and responsive to environment: as a learning mechanism you learn from people in your family and who you can directly see 

• Safer than trial-and-error (behaviorism) 

• Faster than invention and discovery: learn from what others have done 

• Pre-linguistic learning 

When do we start to imitate? Review the Meltzoff & Moore (1977) study on newborns, describe the key results and implications of this study.

At 14 months old we’re able to imitate -18 months 

Results: Infants imitated the modeled action after a 1-week delay, Further studies up to 4 months 

Implications: By 14 months, infants… 

• Attend to others: they pay attention to the person turning the light on with their head so they mimic it 

• Encode observations 

• Store information in memory 

• Retrieve information 

• Act on information 

• Babies enjoy doing it! But hate when the connection is broken 

• Babies expect it: they will do actions like point, smile, and grab to get attention. When they don’t get it they get upset 

Limitations 

• Maybe babies just imitate adults? 

 

3. Are imitated behaviors learned? Review the Meltzoff (1988) study on 14-month-olds, what did researchers find regarding infants’ imitation of modeled actions in lab and after a week delay? What are the implications? 

yes, 6 objects were played with and infants couldn’t touch and then after the week delay they were able to store, retain, and retrieve their knowledge to acomplish most of the target actions

Who do we imitate? Do infants only imitate adults? What did Hanna & Meltzoff (1993) study show about infants’ imitation in the lab, at home and in daycare? Do infants imitate models on TV?  

 

• Babies imitate anybody, if they see a character on a tv do it they will copy. Who toddlers would imitate -copy eachother? Or only adults 

• One toddler does a weird behavior in front of other, does second toddler imitate the other. The second toddler imitates and pick up weird behaviors from peers. 14-18 months old 

When don’t we imitate? According to Repacholi and Meltzoff (2007) study, do 18 month-olds imitate when angry others are present? What about when the angry person leaves the room (i.e., “agent-absent”)? What does this tell us about infants’ imitation? 

5.  

• Angry-present: see the person get mad about hitting head 

• Neutral-present: control condition 

• Angry-absent: angry person leaves 

 

Repacholi and Meltzoff (2007) 

Results: 

• In angry-present condition: 

•  Less likely to imitate: from the video the baby didn’t play with toy when it was given 

• Took longer to touch object 

• Touched the object for less time 

• Looked longer at observer (but not experimenter/parent): watched the angry person 

-would imitate when person left 

when don’t we imitate exam question

childre are more likely to imitate when angry person leaves

What are social norms and what are the key features of social norms?  

standards of behavior (rules) that indicate how people in general can or do or should act 

Features: 

1. carry normative force: set standards of correctness

2. agent-neutral: applied to all individuals in the same way, everyone stops at stop signs

3. contect specific: have different rules in different context, informal norm is we sit in these seats, but if there were tables we’d sit there 

4. reqquire some form of agreement - “I don’t want to participate in the norm”

5. can be arbitrary - no reason we can just do it that way

• Not necessarily logical or moral norms 

E.g. ride airplanes in southwest, you get whatever seat but in Delta have your own seat 

 

2. Understand what formal and informal social norms are. Review how formal and informal social norms were used in the studies we reviewed in class. 

Formal social norms are: very rigid in their rules.  

Informal social norms are perspective based, there’s a right way but it’s not formalized because It's not explicitly stated you must do things a certain way.  

When do children understand formal social norms? Review Rakoczy, Warneken, and Tomasello (2008) study on 2-3 years old. Why would children protest the experimenters’ action? What does this tell us about their understanding of formal norms? 

Example the child who learned what daxing was, he was shown that the correct way is to push the block with the pusher and the wrong way is by tipping the box. When put in a demonstration and a person was tipping the box the child protested. 

When do children understand informal social norms? Review Rakoczy (2008) study about the Soap and Sandwich game. Why do children protest and how does protesting behavior change with age?  

2-3 years. Example: using a toe to peel a potatoe and a green block for soap, when the puppet tried to eat either the kid said no. They can understand pretend play and enforce those informal norms and identify socially representative objects 

When do children understand social norms are dependent on context and agreement? In Wyman et al., what behavior led children to protest significantly more? What does this tell us about their understanding of norms? In study 2, which results tell us that children recognize that social norms are context specific and depend on agreement? 

At 3 years old. Children protested significantly more when the puppet agreed to play, but played the “wrong way” when max agrees to play tooth bursh game but then draws with the pen or when agrees to the zoo table but plays at bobs table. Children recognize norms only apply to those who agree to them, when they disagree in doing it the kid is okay because they expect that. When Max does the correct behavior of brushing teeth but he goes to the bob the builder table when child and experimenter go to zoo and he says he will. This is based on context and agreement. 

Define descriptive and prescriptive norms. Describe what a descriptive-to-prescriptive error is.  

• Descriptive norm: How things usually are Prescriptive norm: How things ought to/should be 

Children at 4-13, do they dissaprove of people who do things differently than their group members? 

There are “Hibbles and glerks” - hibbles like hibble berries, glerks like glerk berries, when there’s non-conforming glerk that eats hibble berries is it okay? Most children said it was more “not okay” to eat a berry typically eaten by another group – decreased with age but still there, but adults said its okay to eat other berries. Children often assume that the way the world is, is the way the world “should” be. Group membership implies agreement - agree to the norms of this group 

descriptive

how things are in the world: flashing your brights on someone, you don’t get in trouble if you do these things 

prescriptive

how things should be: we drive on the right side of the road in illinois 

What do children think about people who deviate from descriptive norms according to Roberts et al study? Understand the set of results about children’s evaluation, willingness to befriend, views on others’ preferences, and their sharing behavior with the agent who deviates from descriptive norms.  

• 3-5 years old: 1. Is this a good or bad Glerk?The conforming hubble is good and other is bad 2. Would you want to be friends with this Glerk? Yes i want friend with conforming, no to not conforming. Do you think other Glerks like this Glerk? Will like the conforming hubble than non. How much gold would you give them? Give more gold to conforming hibble.  

• Children attend to group-based norms because assume group membership imples agreement to a norm. They expect people to act in line with lose norms, assume descriptive norms are prescriptive and punish people who deviate from them. 

What are social categories? Humans love to organize ourselves into groups AKA: Social categories 

-Nationality, religion, hair color, gender, race, sports team, university • Sometimes real: we’re so group orientated we sometimes make arbitrary groups, sometimes real 

What is the difference between ingroups and outgroups?

Ingroup: Individuals who match one’s own group membership, in your group identity Outgroup: Individuals who do not match one’s own ingroup 

Why are we driven to form social categories? 

We like to organiz the world and make a sense of community. It facilitates coordination – sports team: passing the ball to team mate instead of competing with them. Identifies cooperators and competitors, bolsters self-esteem: only associated when they’re successful in baseball, wear more college gear after a win then when we lose not as much 

How do children decide what groups to form? Most likely to identify groups that are: 

- Perceptually distinct: things that are easy to see are grouped by children, ot easy aren’t mentioned 

-Disproportionate in number: Categories with fewer members are more salient 

-Explicitly and implicitly used: Segregation, different treatment/roles 

-Labeled 

What are essentialist beliefs and how are they measured in research? 

6.  

A lay theory about what groups “are”, what one subjectively believes a group means 

• Membership in group is determined by intrinsic “essences” 

• Often contrasted with extrinsic and cultural explanations 

 Examples of essentialist beliefs: A girl growing up with all brothers will still prefer dolls to trucks, Black people excel at sports because of a specific gene, Liberals and conservatives are fundamentally distinct “kinds” of people 

What do essentialist beliefs do? 

• Shape the assumptions we make about ourselves and others, Guide our actions when making decisions, Lead to biases, prejudice, discrimination, and dehumanization 

How do children develop essentialist beliefs? Review Rhodes, Leslie, and Tworek (2012) study about Zarpies. What were children and adults likely to do when they heard no label vs generic labels vs specific labels? What might the implications from this study tell us about the language we use with children when describing groups? 

Introduced to a novel group (Zarpies) via a storybook 3 Conditions: 1. Generic label • “Boys play with trucks” • “A lady never tells” 2. Specific label: “This boy plays with trucks”, “This lady never tells” 

3. No label: “This one ____”.  

• Children (and adults) held more essentialist beliefs when group members were described using generic labels 

-also conveying meaning of what it means to be in that category.  

• The language we use to talk about groups shapes how we think about them,  parents would read a paragraph to child, Parents in essentialist condition used more generic labels than those in non-essentialist condition 

What problems arise when children hold essentialist beliefs? Racism and stereotype 

1. Humans group the world into categories:  Perceptual similarities, group size, treatment, labels 

2. Labels lead children to view groups as meaningful: Share properties 

3. Children perceive groups as defined by an “essence”: Recognize importance of environment with age 

4. Generic labels lead children to essentialize groups: How we talk to kids matters! 

Exam question: What is the most accurate way birds lay eggs 

-most birds do not lay eggs 

How do children develop essentialist beliefs? Review Rhodes, Leslie, and Tworek (2012) study about Zarpies. What were children and adults likely to do when they heard no label vs generic labels vs specific labels? What might the implications from this study tell us about the language we use with children when describing groups?

Introduced to a novel group (Zarpies) via a storybook 3 Conditions: 1. Generic label • “Boys play with trucks” • “A lady never tells” 2. Specific label: “This boy plays with trucks”, “This lady never tells” 

3. No label: “This one ____”.  

• Children (and adults) held more essentialist beliefs when group members were described using generic labels 

-also conveying meaning of what it means to be in that category.  

• The language we use to talk about groups shapes how we think about them,  parents would read a paragraph to child, Parents in essentialist condition used more generic labels than those in non-essentialist condition 

What problems arise when children hold essentialist beliefs? Racism and stereotype 

1. Humans group the world into categories:  Perceptual similarities, group size, treatment, labels 

2. Labels lead children to view groups as meaningful: Share properties 

3. Children perceive groups as defined by an “essence”: Recognize importance of environment with age 

4. Generic labels lead children to essentialize groups: How we talk to kids matters! 

Review: Dunham et al., (2011). Does group membership affect how much children like ingroup vs outgroup members? How did group membership affect children’s resource allocation? Do 5-year old children form biases for “minimal groups”?  

5 year olds, arbitrary groups and have no value until experimenter introduces value, left, middle, right room – biases for “minimal groups” 

• Flipped a coin for which group was red or blue and then asked how much do you like this kid and who do you want to give more rewards to?  

Attitudes: Ingroup >Outgroup: like ingroup members more than outgroup just because they’re on the same team 

Resources: Ingroup >Outgroup: shape how children think and act towards other people 

• Implication: Children develop biases based on even minimal group affiliations - the shirt color

Review findings from Rizzo et al., (2018, 2020, 2023), what trends were seen among children randomly assigned to the advantage group? What are the implications of these studies? Hint: E.g., ToM, fairness, essentialist reasoning, resource allocation, etc. 

2.  

Used 4-8 year old children and assigneds kids to groups of flurps or glorps to indudce esstentialist beliefs by giving a magical hat and it tells them which group they’re in and assigned to. Flurps and gloprs on playground: more flurps so they could play, fluprs can make jokes in class and not florps bc they’ll get in trouble, flurps get more coins than girls. 

• Contents False-Belief ToM:  measures if you can think about others belief states.  

• Belief-Emotion ToM:Can emotional and belief states be connected told someone gets a box and find out it has rocks inside 

Advantaged children were worse at identifying what other people thought and felt. Disadvantage thought it was unfair but the advantaged thought it was fair. Advantaged children said it’s not okay to challenge the hierarcyh. Mesured essentialist beliefs about high-status group, results: advantaged children were more likely to essentialize high status. When asked how much do you like a kid they were more positive about high-status groups and negative about low statu. 

At what ages do children start to show gender biases? How does this affect how much kids like their ingroup (i.e., same gender) vs the outgroup (i.e., different gender)? 

At 5 years old, even as young as 3 Childhood is gender coded, the gender reveal party, bathrooms we use, labels we use. Gender is pervasive of early childhood. Has really good sign 

-play around with the idea of gender segregation, it’s a social category in childhood and kids use it to inform their beliefs 

Given the results from Rizzo et al., (2021) about children’s racial biases, at around what age do children begin to show racially biased attitudes and playmate preferences (i.e., are children born with biases, do they develop during early childhood [3-4 year olds], or do they only develop later in adolescence?). How does the development of racial biases differ by participants’ race? 

Emerges by 2-4 and peaks at 5-7 years old and then declines (specific study was 4 years old). Asked questions as “How much do you like this kid? How nice do you think the kid is?”, at first no significant bias, but over time white and non-black children of color developed biased attitudes between 4th-5th birthday.  For their playmate preferences asked “which of these kids would want to play with the most?” White and non-Black children of color: Already held biased playmate preferences before 4th birthday, Became more biased (stronger) between 4th and 5th birthday 4.25 years 

What is the one way that children develop biases? 

One way that children develop biases is by: observe patterns in environment e.g. gravity: how a spoon falls down and how father picks it up, how the world functions 

1. Observing bias, prejudice, and discrimination in their daily lives 

• may be seeing Segregation 

• may be seeing Inequality 

2. Forming beliefs to explain those observations 

• Descriptive-to-prescriptive social norms: maybe we should be segregated if people are already separated, can lead to bias 

• Essentialist beliefs: something about my racial identity determines my status 

3. Using those explanations to inform future beliefs and actions 

How are children’s beliefs about social norms related to their racial biases? Hint: Rizzo et al. (2021) 

Children play with racial groups they thought their friends would want to play with and parents would want to play with. 

How social norms affect racial biases 

• 4 year old kids have biases – pro white and antiblack 

• Prowhite biase developed through 4th year of life 

• Bias in playmate preferences, children were below chance for anti-black preferences 

-what predicts which kids are more likely to have bias 

1) perception of segregation 

2)perception of inequality  

* idea is that kids who expected that their friends / parents wouldn’t want them to play with black kids, they would then not play with them. Act on how they think they should act 

What are the two types of explanations for racial inequalities that Rizzo and colleagues examined? Which explanation do they find is associated with more bias and which is associated with less bias? 

-why does this inequality exist? 

• Intrinsic (Essentialist): it’s because of who they are on the inside, the belief that racial inequalities are caused by inherent, internal, or natural differences between racial groups. Do the kids link race and status and biases? 

• Extrinsic (non-essentialist): it’s because of things that happen in the world, belief that racial inequalities are caused by external factors, environment, social conditions, or systemic structures 

• Children who endorsed intrinsic (essentialist) explanations became more biased over time because of who they believed they should be playing with (4.25 years old) 

*intrinsic between racial groups – essentialist, that racial category and weath are interlinked, if essentialist would become more biased over time 

*extrinsic – less about group differences but how they’ve been treated differently in society 

Review findings from the Rizzo et al., (2022) study investigating the impact of children’s neighborhood/environment on the development of biases. What are the factors that do not predict biases in early childhood? What was found to put children at a higher risk of forming racial biases?  

Mainly 4–8-year-old white children held racial bias. This was NOT predicted by parent politics; it had no relation on children’s biases; political identity had no impact. Neighborhood diversity played a role, if they have never seen an inequality, it doesn’t affect children, but if they see it every day it has a big effect n how they make sense of their daily life. How do children develop biases? 

One way that children develop biases is by: 1. Observing bias, prejudice, and discrimination in their daily lives: Segregation, Inequality. 2. Forming beliefs to explain those observations: Descriptive-to-prescriptive social norms, Essentialist beliefs 3. Using those explanations to inform future beliefs and actions 

Results: Explanations for inequalities were especially predictive of racial biases for children living in more unequal neighborhoods 

Implications: Helping children understand the inequalities they see around them might help prevent emergence of racial biases 

• Have less biases when there’s structure in inequality 

Inequality: 4 year olds are aware of racial inequality 

-more likely to say white child is in qealthy house and black child is in not as nice house 

Violation of expectation 

In what ways might media affect children’s development of racial bias (Rizzo et al., in prep)? How does this vary by children’s age? 

In what ways might media affect children’s development of racial bias (Rizzo et al., in prep)? How does this vary by children’s age? 

What are some promising approaches to reducing bias? 

Establish inclusive norms in schools 

• Create inclusive school norms 

• Facilitate inclusive peer norms, especially in early childhood 

Disrupt essentialist beliefs 

• Educate about how language shapes development 

• Educate about group differences and disparities 

Increase intergroup contact 

• Design programs with shared goals (emphasizing shared humanity) - positive intergroup contact can break essentialist beliefs 

• Encourage intergroup cooperation/coordination: there’s no common enemy, slight drop in bias in the beginning and can inflame and make things worse