We not only care about what others think of the world, but also about what others think of us. The ability to understand what others think of one’s competence is especially important for young children, as they are beginning to learn about them- selves and form new relationships with others. Here we ask whether young children can use others’ observations of their own failures and successes to infer others’ beliefs about the self’s competence, and would even forego an opportunity to teach new information in order to demonstrate their compe- tence. In Exp. 1 (3, 4, & 5-year-olds), when a confederate had observed the child initially fail but eventually succeed at op- erating a toy, children chose to teach her a new toy; however, when the confederate had observed the initial failures but not the final success, more children chose to show the familiar toy again to demonstrate their competence. In Exp. 2 (3- & 4- year-olds), we replicate this finding. Even in preschool years, children can reason about what others of their own competence and strategically decide whether to communicate information about the self or the world; these results are discussed in light of prior work on reputation management and Theory of Mind.

Even infants have a remarkably sophisticated understanding of objects, agents, and how they interact. We investi-gated young children’s ability to reason about the relationship between complexity of physical structures created by agents, theirperceived difficulty, and the time required for creating these structures. Seventy 4-5 year-olds were shown trials consisting ofpairs of agents who had the same numbers of blocks but made different structures (e.g., horizontal line vs. vertical tower, castlestructure vs. two piles of blocks). Children were asked which structure was easier to make (Difficulty condition) or who wasdone first (Time condition). Even the youngest participants were successful in determining which structure is more difficult,but their estimates of time showed improvement with age. These results offer novel insights into how an early understanding ofdifficulty and time shape young children’s beliefs about how agents intervene on the physical world to induce changes in theirstates.

We care tremendously about what other people think of us.Motivated by two lines of prior work – children’s inferentialand communicative capacities and strategic reputation man-agement – we examine how children infer what others thinkof them given others’ observations of their performance, andhow they influence these beliefs through disclosing their per-formance. In Experiment 1, 3-5 year-olds played a luck-basedgame; one confederates watched the child win and anotherconfederate watched the child lose. We asked the child to dis-close an additional, unobserved win to one of the two confed-erates. We find that younger children overwhelmingly choosethe person who previously saw them win. However, as ageincreased, children were more likely to choose to disclose tosomeone who previously saw them lose. In Experiment 2,adults played a similar third person version and selectivelychose the person who saw the main character previously lose.

What underlies young children’s failure in evaluating underinformative teachers? We explore the hypothesis that children have difficulty representing relevant alternatives; knowing what the teacher could have done. Children rated two teachers who demonstrated toys to a na¨ıve learner. One group first observed a fully informative teacher and then an underinformative teacher, while the other group saw the reverse order. Six- and seven-year-olds successfully rated the underinformative teacher lower than the fully-informative teacher regardless of the order (Exp.1). However, four- and five-yearolds showed this pattern only when they saw the fully informative teacher first (Exp.2). Given a binary choice after seeing both teachers, four-year-olds showed a preference for the fully informative teacher (Exp.3). We discuss these results in light of recent literature on children’s understanding of pragmatic violations in linguistic communication; the contrast between the fully informative vs. under-informative teachers might help children understand what the teacher could have shown.

Students often receive encouragement ("You can do it!") to take on and stick with challenges, yet they don’t always listen. Past work suggests that domain knowledge underlies speaker credibility. We propose that students find encouragement more or less motivating based not only on the speaker’s domain knowledge (e.g., math), but also on their knowledge of the student’s abilities (e.g., math abilities). Adolescents (n=369; ages 11-19) said they would be more likely to seek out and listen to encouragement from a hypothetical person who has both knowledge of the domain and their abilities compared to someone who has knowledge of just one or neither. When asked to reason about real people in their lives (parents, teachers, peers), knowledge of domain and ability also significantly predicted whose encouragement participants would seek out and listen to. Ongoing work is experimentally testing this hypothesis with behavioral measures of persistence and challenge-seeking.

The ability to reason about task difficulty is critical for manyreal-world decisions. Building on prior work on preschoolers’inferences about the difficulty of novel physical tasks (Gweonet al., 2017), here we ask whether this ability further supportsrational allocation of effort in collaborative and individual con-texts. When an agent could offer help to someone who had tocomplete a hard task versus someone who had to complete aneasy task, adults and preschoolers offered help with the hardertask (Collaborative Goal). When an agent could choose tocomplete a hard task or an easy task to achieve the same out-come, adults and preschoolers preferentially chose the easiertask (Individual Goal). In the absence of explicit informationabout the relative difficulty of tasks, even young children in-ferred the expected difficulty of tasks and appropriately allo-cated effort across agents and across tasks. Beyond expectingagents to choose actions that maximize their own utility in in-dividual contexts, our results show that even preschool-agedchildren readily understand how deviating from this choice canbe desirable in cooperative contexts.

Reasoning about others’ emotions is a crucial component in so-cial cognition. Here, we tested the ability of preschool childrento reason about an agent’s emotions following an unexpectedoutcome. Importantly, we controlled for the actual payoff ofthe outcome, while varying the prior expectation of the agents.Five-year-olds, but not four-year-olds, were able to correctlyjudge an agent’s emotions following an unexpected outcome(Experiment 1). When explicitly provided with the agent’s ex-pectations, 4-year-olds were then also able to correctly judgethe agent’s feelings (Experiment 2). Our results suggest thatthe ability to reason about emotions given outcomes and priorexpectations develops by 4 years of age, while the ability tospontaneously infer such prior expectations develops soon af-ter. We discuss our results in light of the developmental litera-ture on emotion understanding and counterfactual reasoning.

The ability to reason about the difficulty of novel tasks is criti-cal for many real-world decisions. To decide whether to tacklea task or how to divide labor across people, we must estimatethe difficulty of the goal in the absence of prior experience.Here we examine adults’ and preschoolers’ inferences aboutthe difficulty of simple block-building tasks. Exp.1 first estab-lished that building time is a useful proxy for difficulty. Exp.2asked participants to view the initial and final states of variousblock-building tasks and judge their relative difficulty. Whileadults were near-ceiling on all trials, children showed varyinglevels of performance depending on the nature of the dimen-sions that varied across structures. Exp. 3 replicated the pat-tern. These results suggest that children can reverse-engineerthe process of goal-directed actions to infer the relative diffi-culty of novel tasks, although their ability to incorporate morenuanced factors may continue to develop.

Gender stereotypes are early-emerging and harmful for young children. However, it is unclear how children reason about other people's gender stereotypes, especially when they differ from children's own beliefs. Across two preregistered experiments (total n=271), we tested whether 5- to 7-year-old children expect teachers to give engineering games to boy students and story games to girl students, even when children themselves know that these are not students' true preferences. Experiment 1 found that participants were more likely to predict that a teacher would give students stereotypical games when the teacher did not know (versus did know) the students' true counter-stereotypical interests. In Experiment 2, when the students expressed interest in both games, 6- and 7-year-olds selectively predicted that teachers would give students whom they had just met stereotypical games. Thus, by the time children enter school, they think that adults hold gender stereotypes, even if children know these stereotypes are inaccurate, which may impact children's learning and decision-making in the classroom.

Over-engaged parenting is on the rise: Parents in the U.S. are increasingly completing developmentally appropriate tasks for young children, which relates to reduced child persistence. What can help parents to step back? Across two pre-registered studies, we test the novel hypothesis that parents step back when they prioritize their child’s learning. In line with this hypothesis, parents of 4-5-year-olds (N = 77) reported taking over less on tasks from which they think their child learns more, which was more often the case for academic (versus non-academic) tasks (Study 1). Study 2 found causal evidence for this hypothesis: Emphasizing children’s learning in a novel, non-academic context reduced parents' (N = 60) taking over actions by half compared to a control condition. This work shows that parents take over less when they think that their young child is learning and opens new avenues for interventions to reduce over-engaged parenting.