Young children preferentially include same-gender peers in their play, restricting learning opportunities and reinforcingstereotypical gender roles (Ruble et al., 2006). Two studies aimed to reduce 4-6-year-old childrens gender-based exclu-sion through a perspective-taking intervention. Study 1 (N=98, M=5.38 years) evaluated whether inviting participantsto consider peers exclusion-related emotions would lead participants to subsequently include (new) other-gender peers.Participants in the intervention condition were more socially inclusive from pre- to post-test than were participants in acontrol condition (p¡0.05). Study 2 (N=101, M=5.37 years) replicated the results from Study 1 (p¡0.05) and demonstratedthat changes in childrens inclusive behaviors from pre- to post-test were not driven by social desirability concerns; childrenbecame more inclusive whether or not an experimenter watched them make their choices (p ¿ 0.75). Ongoing research istesting whether the effectiveness of the present intervention is amplified when children can see (rather than infer) excludedchildrens emotional reactions.

People who are in close relationships tend to do and like the same things, a phenomenon termed the "homophily principle." The present research probed for evidence of the homophily principle in 4- to 6-year-old children. Across two experiments, participants (N = 327; 166 girls, 161 boys; located in the Midwestern United States) were asked to predict the closeness of two people based on their preferences. Participants in Experiment 1 indicated that people with a shared preference or a shared dispreference were more closely affiliated than people whose preferences diverged, suggesting inferences of homophily. Furthermore, children were not only relying on the emotional valences expressed: They expected people with a shared preference to be closer than people who expressed positive emotions about different items and expected people with a shared dispreference to be closer than people who expressed negative emotions about different items. Experiment 2 replicated and extended the main findings of Experiment 1 with more naturalistic stimuli. The present studies provide strong evidence that young children apply the homophily principle to their reasoning about social relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

One challenge that children face when learning from others isthat social agents can behave in unpredictable ways. Socialagents may acquire—or fail to acquire—new information thatinfluences how they interact with the learner. Little is knownabout children’s sensitivity to these changes or howeffectively children update their own behavior in response.Participants (N = 129) searched for rewards while receivingsuggestions from a social agent. The suggestions changed inlevel of reliability over time. All children updated howheavily they weighted the cues after the change. However,younger children were more influenced by their initialexperience with the suggestions, indicating that youngerchildren may have more difficulty disengaging from socialinformation in uncertain learning environments.