How will people act?

For 9- to 10-year-olds who live in the United States

Your child will be introduced to some kids at a new school, and we'll ask him or her to guess how the kids will behave toward one another - sometimes, we will ask about mean behaviors, and sometimes, we will ask about nice behaviors. The characters will include cartoon images of kids from a made-up school, as well as real pictures of children who vary by race and gender. There will also be a survey where you (the parent) will answer questions about your children's exposure to people from different racial groups.

In this study, we're interested in how young children expect social groups to influence people's behavior. We know that when children are introduced to made-up groups of people, they expect people to be nice to ingroup members and mean to outgroup members. Here, we want to know if children have these same expectations for other kinds of groups, like race. We also want to know how children's own experiences with diversity inform their expectations. Your child's responses can teach scientists about how these expectations develop across childhood, which can inform future efforts at encouraging children to be nice to others, no matter who they are.

10 minutes

After you participate, within two weeks, we'll email you a $5 (USD) Amazon gift card as a thank-you! One gift card per child (even if they do the study more than once). Child must be in the age range for the study and located in the United States for you to receive the gift card.