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Research in political psychology largely ignores early childhood. This is likely due to the assumption that young children lack the cognitive capacity and social understanding needed for political thought. Challenging this assumption, we argue that research with young children is both possible and important for political psychologists. We focus on the topic of political ideology to demonstrate our argument. We review recent evidence revealing that social cognition in early childhood—and even infancy—is already oriented toward group living in ways that set the foundation of political thought. Young children notice key dimensions of group living (e.g., group boundaries, hierarchies, norms) and use them to guide their reasoning and behavior. Beyond these basic proto‐political sensitivities, young children also display proto‐political attitudes: valenced and/or prescriptive cognitions about dimensions of group living that have political significance (e.g., disliking nonconforming group members, believing that hierarchy between groups is wrong). Even more reminiscent of mainstream political psychology, young children's proto‐political sensitivities and attitudes exhibit systematic individual differences that can roughly be mapped onto three ideological orientations common among adults: authoritarianism, social dominance, and hawkish ideology. We discuss ways in which research with young children is critical for a complete understanding of adult political psychology.

AbstractWe tested the hypothesis that political attitudes are influenced by an information‐processing factor – namely, a bias in the content of everyday explanations. Because many societal phenomena are enormously complex, people's understanding of them often relies on heuristic shortcuts. For instance, when generating explanations for such phenomena (e.g., why does this group have low status?), people often rely on facts that they can retrieve easily from memory – facts that are skewed toward inherent or intrinsic features (e.g., this group is unintelligent). We hypothesized that this bias in the content of heuristic explanations leads to a tendency to (1) view socioeconomic stratification as acceptable and (2) prefer current societal arrangements to alternative ones, two hallmarks of conservative ideology. Moreover, since the inherence bias in explanation is present across development, we expected it to shape children's proto‐political judgments as well. Three studies with adults and 4‐ to 8‐year‐old children (N = 784) provided support for these predictions: Not only did individual differences in reliance on inherent explanations uniquely predict endorsement of conservative views (particularly the stratification‐supporting component; Study 1), but manipulations of this explanatory bias also had downstream consequences for political attitudes in both children and adults (Studies 2 and 3). This work contributes to our understanding of the origins of political attitudes.

Generic statements (e.g., "Birds lay eggs") express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as "Lorches have purple feathers" as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than generic sentences that were similar but did not have these connotations. In addition to clarifying important aspects of generics' meaning, these findings are applicable to a range of real-world processes such as stereotyping and political discourse.

AbstractSuccess in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is often believed to require intellectual talent ("brilliance"). Given that many cultures associate men more than women with brilliance, this belief poses an obstacle to women's STEM pursuits. Here, we investigated the developmental roots of this phenomenon, focusing specifically on young children's beliefs about math (N = 174 U.S. students in Grades 1–4; 93 girls, 81 boys; 52% White, 17% Asian, 13% Hispanic/Latinx). We found that field‐specific ability beliefs (FABs) that associate success in math (vs. reading/writing) with brilliance are already present in early elementary school. We also found that brilliance‐oriented FABs about math are negatively associated with elementary school students' (and particularly girls') math motivation—specifically, their math self‐efficacy and interest. The early emergence of brilliance‐oriented FABs about math and the negative relation between FABs and math motivation underscore the need to understand the sources and long‐term effects of these beliefs.Research Highlights
Field‐specific ability beliefs (FABs) are beliefs about the extent to which intellectual talent (or "brilliance") is required for success in a particular field or context.
Among adults, brilliance‐oriented FABs are an obstacle to diversity in science and technology, but the childhood antecedents of these beliefs are not well understood.
The present study (N = 174) found that FABs that associate success in math (vs. reading/writing) with brilliance were already present in Grades 1−4.
Brilliance‐oriented FABs about math were negatively associated with elementary school students' (and particularly girls') math motivation—specifically, their math self‐efficacy and interest.

AbstractPsychological essentialism is a pervasive conceptual bias to view categories as reflecting something deep, stable, and informative about their members. Scholars from diverse disciplines have long theorized that psychological essentialism has negative ramifications for inter‐group relations, yet little previous empirical work has experimentally tested the social implications of essentialist beliefs. Three studies (N = 127, ages 4.5–6) found that experimentally inducing essentialist beliefs about a novel social category led children to share fewer resources with category members, but did not lead to the out‐group dislike that defines social prejudice. These findings indicate that essentialism negatively influences some key components of inter‐group relations, but does not lead directly to the development of prejudice.