Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.