Facial characteristics are reliably associated with social judgments, but these relationships may depend on whether a judgment is consistent with stereotypes of the target’s social group. Across four ...

Compositionality is the property of a representational system whereby complex meanings arise from the combination of simpler meaningful elements. Here we take a developmental perspective to…

Abstract. Even young toddlers coordinate actions with a partner. But coordinating choices or decisions is more challenging, particularly in multi-party gro

The Department of Psychology at Stanford University is seeking applicants for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position, with a research focus on developmental and/or social psychology. In addition ...

Abstract. The term 5- to 7-year shift refers to the marked changes in behavior observed as children transition from preschool age to school age. In 1996, a

Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 26 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02540-2Harootonian et al. find that people switch between effortful, tailored teaching and easier, simple shortcuts, favouring shortcuts even when unhelpful. Prompting participants to reflect on learners’ limitations restores effective, personalized instruction.

The free-rider detection problem: How groups balance fairness and cooperation

Abstract. Children often deny the possibility of unusual and improbable events and immoral actions. Three preregistered experiments on 5- and 6-year-old ch

AI can uncover problem-solving strategies beyond human discovery. Here, the authors show that AI-discovered strategies propagate and persist in human populations, producing cultural shifts when non-tr...

Abstract. The exchange of reasons in rational discourse is crucial for resolving disagreements. In a preregistered cross-cultural study, 360 5- to 9-year-o

Abstract. Young children struggle in situations involving mere possibility, such as when a target object could be in one of two possible locations. This difficulty is often interpreted as a general…

Abstract. Can you perform an action intentionally if there was only a small chance your action would succeed? Researchers studying the folk concept of intentional action have documented complex…

Abstract. A necessary prerequisite for the accumulation of beneficial knowledge, or ‘cumulative cultural evolution’, is the sharing of information via soci

Cognitive representations of social relationships and their developmental origins - Volume 49

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Visual summary of the paper. Taking inspiration from the contractualist tradition in moral philosophy is helpful to better understand morality at three interrelated levels of analysis: Its evolutiona...