While people may be reluctant to explicitly state social stereotypes, their underlying beliefs may nonetheless leak out in subtler conversational cues, such as surprisal reactions that convey information about expectations. Across 3 experiments with adults and children (ages 4-9), we compare permissive responses ("Sure, you can have that one") that vary the presence of surprisal cues (interjections "oh!" and disfluencies "um"). In Experiment 1 (n = 120), children by 6-to-7 use surprisal reactions to infer that a boy more likely made a counter-stereotypical choice. In Experiment 2, we demonstrate that these cues are sufficient for children (n = 120) and adults (n = 80) to learn a novel expectation about a group of aliens. In Experiment 3, adults (n = 150) use the distribution of surprisal information to infer whether a novel behavior is gender-stereotyped. Across these experiments, we see emerging evidence that conversational feedback may provide a crucial and unappreciated avenue for the transmission of social beliefs.

Successful and repeated cooperation requires fairly sharingthe spoils of joint endeavors. Fair distribution is often doneaccording to preferences for equitable outcomes even thoughstrictly equitable outcomes can lead to inefficient waste. In ad-dition to preferences about the outcome itself, decision makersare also sensitive to the attributions others might make aboutthem as a result of their choice. We develop a novel mathemat-ical model where decision makers turn their capacity to inferlatent desires and beliefs from the behavior of others (theory-of-mind) towards themselves, anticipating the judgments oth-ers will make about them. Using this model we can construct apreference to be seen as impartial and integrate it with prefer-ences for equitable and efficient outcomes. We test this modelin two studies where the anticipated attribution of impartialityis ambiguous: when one agent is more deserving than the otherand when unbiased procedures for distribution are made avail-able. This model explains both participants’ judgments aboutthe partiality of others and their hypothetical decisions. Ourmodel argues that people avoid inequity not only because theyfind it inherently undesirable, they also want to avoid beingjudged as partial.

Collaboration can make collective judgments more accurate than individual judgments, but it also comes with costs in time, effort, and social cohesion. But how do we estimate these costs? In two experiments, we introduce children and adults to two teams in which the teammates disagree about the optimal solution to a novel problem, and ask which team would need more time to reach a consensus decision. We find that all ages expect slower decisions from teams with more people or factions, and expect the number of factions to matter more than the number of people. But only adults expect decisions initially endorsed by a stronger faction to be faster than those endorsed by a weaker faction. Results are discussed in context of children’s reasoning about dominance, and models of time-rational collective decision-making.