Guess the Friend!

For children aged 4-7 years old who live in a monolingual English-speaking household and are located in the USA.

This study will take place on a video call, live with a researcher! Clicking on the “Schedule a time to participate” button will send you to an online calendar where you can select a date and time that works for you. During the testing session, your child will watch a series of videos about three people. Questions may be asked about the interactions (e.g, sequence of standing up from the chair), preferences (e.g., type of stuffed animal), and languages spoken (e.g., German and Chinese) of/by the three people. Most importantly, your child will be asked which pair of actors are most likely to become friends. Prior to watching the videos, the researcher will explain the rules of the task to your child. This study includes audio of non-english languages and it is imperative that children do not understand what it being said. Thus, this study is only for children who know English and no other languages.

Currently, we know that children and adults can successfully use similarity cues such as language, behavior, and preference to predict who they will be friends with. With our study, we hope to find out if children children 4- to 7-years-old can use these similarity cues to predict friendships between other people (third party friendships). This research contributes to our efforts to understand children’s cognitive development, including their development of knowledge and reasoning about the social world.

15-20 minutes

We will send a $5 Amazon.com gift card within a 5 business days after the testing session is complete. To be eligible for compensation, the following criteria must be met:
(1) The child must be between 4 - 7 years old.
(2) The child must be visible during the study session.
(3) One of the child's primary languages must be English, as this study will be presented in English.