Blue dots, yellow dots!

For 7- and 8-year-olds

Your child will complete four trials of a dot-counting task to try out for a "club". Regardless of performance, your child will be rejected from the club. Then, your child will answer questions about their own ability and choose whether they want to play again. At the end of the study, your child will get into the club. We will tell them that there was something wrong with our system and not with their performance.

Rejection is a universal experience, but how we react to it is not. Our first experiences with rejection come early in life: We don’t make the good soccer team or the chess club and wonder what happened. Prior research shows that adults rationalize rejection in different ways, attributing failure to different causes. Here, we investigate how children reason causally about rejection. Ultimately, we hope to uncover the factors that lead to increased persistence in the face of failure.

15 minutes

After you finish the study, we will email you a $5 Giftogram gift card within a week of participation. To be eligible for the gift card and certificate: (1) your child must be in the age range for this study, (2) English is (one of) your child's first language(s), (3) you need to submit a valid consent statement, and (4) we need to see that there is a child with you during the experiment. Each child is eligible to participate to receive a gift card only once; participants cannot do the study more than once for compensation.