Andrei Cimpian

You know that annoying NSF form "List every coauthor/co-PI from the last 4y" ?

At @cevianlabs.io we built a free tool that drafts the COI form from your PDF CV in minutes. Check it out 👇

Some of our (sad) numbers on this topic: drive.google.com/file/d/1kATT...

Lab manager position in the Cognitive Development Lab Please forward to motivated students! Apply here: https://apply.interfolio.com/182022 Deadline: March 2, 2026 Questions? Email andrei.cimpian@nyu.edu

Looking for a lab manager! Join us! 😊
apply.interfolio.com/182022

From a Baby’s Point of View: How Infants’ Face Diets Shape Their Face Perception - Charisse B. Pickron, Laurie Bayet, 2026 Individual variations in face-perception expertise become apparent by the second year of life. We propose that infants’ “face diet”—the nature and quantity of t...

New paper! Had lots of fun writing this with @lauriebayet.bsky.social There is so much more to say about extrinsic and intrinsic experiences which shape infants' face perception and learning, hopefully this keeps & starts conversations about a topic we love!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Terrific new work by @linbian.bsky.social 👇

Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars?

These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research.

So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

The emergence of political orientation: Authoritarian and social dominance attitudes in early childhood

📣From Michal Reifen-Tagar, Ghadir Zreik, Andrei Cimpian & Sharon Shenhav

7/ Paper now out in the special issue of JEP:G
@apajournals.bsky.social on Political Thinking (editors: Boli Reyes-Jaquez & Tamar Kushnir)
psycnet.apa.org/PsycARTICLES...

Grateful to Michal and our collaborators ❤️

Free pdf: drive.google.com/file/d/1UvN2...

6/ If orientations toward authority and social hierarchy take root this early, it may help explain why political divides run so deep -- and why changing minds is so difficult.

Understanding these origins could shed light on polarization and intergroup conflict.

5/ An interesting wrinkle:

The parent-child link was stronger when mothers were primary caregivers.

This hints that socialization -- not just genetics -- may play a role in how these early attitudes form.

4/ Across two samples of Israeli mother-child pairs, 4- to 8-year-old kids showed systematic individual differences in their responses to our child-friendly measures of authoritarianism and social dominance.

Why do I say "systematic"? Their responses correlated with their mothers' ideologies.

3/ To make this work with young children, we designed measures using fictional groups on "faraway planets" -- no real-world politics involved.

Kids answered questions like whether it's okay for a character to disobey a king, or whether it's fair that one group has more resources than another.

2/ We measured two core components of political orientation:

* authoritarianism (attitudes toward authority/social conventions)

* social dominance (attitudes toward group-based hierarchies)

Political ideology guides individuals’ perceptions, goals, and behaviors in the socio-political arena, with profound societal consequences. Prior research on the emergence of individual differences in ideological orientation points to early adulthood as the critical age at which such differences first manifest. We challenge this conclusion and investigate whether systematic proto-ideological orientations are already present among children as young as 4 years of age. Specifically, we examined individual differences in children’s authoritarian and social dominance attitudes – two central, consequential ideological orientations among adults. To determine whether children’s early attitudes are valid markers of ideological orientations per se, we tested whether these attitudes were systematically related to parents’ ideological orientations, as is the case among young adults. Across two studies with Israeli mothers and their 4- to 8-year-old children (Ns = 154 and 190, respectively), we found systematic individual differences in children’s authoritarian and social dominance attitudes, measured with newly developed, child-appropriate measures: Children’s authoritarian attitudes corresponded to their mothers’ authoritarianism (Study 1), and their social dominance attitudes corresponded to their mothers’ social dominance orientation with regard to hierarchy (but not inequality; Studies 1 and 2). Notably, mother–child correlations were especially strong among children whose mothers were their primary caregivers, hinting at a possible socialization process. Together, these findings suggest that the seeds of ideology are apparent as early as age 4, and highlight the importance of developmental research for a deeper understanding of adult political ideology. We consider contextual limitations to the generalizability of our findings and offer directions for future research.

1/ Why do political disagreements feel so hard to resolve -- even with people we otherwise get along with?

New research, led by my friend Michal Reifen-Tagar, suggests one reason: the foundations of political orientation may be in place by age 4.

Paper: drive.google.com/file/d/1UvN2...

Important new work on girls' and boys' sense of belonging in STEM across K-12 by @allisonmaster.bsky.social, @patelkhushboo.bsky.social, and colleagues! 💯

the Summer Internship

We're doing summerpsych.com again this year!

PhD curious undergrads, come hang out at the CSI lab, help us push forward a project and develop your social science chops Applications are due March 1st:

Gender differences in mathematics in 1st grade: what are the causes? How to reduce them?
This is the talk I will give (based on the doctoral work of Lilas Gurgand) at the next online research seminar of the Centre for Educational Neuroscience, University of London ⬇️

The journal article itself, in press at Developmental Psychology @apajournals.bsky.social:

psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-...

Important new work by @melismuradoglu.bsky.social and colleagues on early beliefs about ability and their links to motivation ✨

I shared this a few days ago and your description seems to match -- apologies if not. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Journal - CDS

The Journal of Cognition and Development, the official journal of the Cognitive Development Society, is seeking nominations for the Editor-in-Chief, with the term to begin on July 1, 2026.

Application materials are due February 16.

For more information, visit: cogdevsoc.org/journal/

Thank you! Excited for our upcoming collaborative contribution on this topic as well! 🤗

Dominance and Prestige Motivations to Lead in Adolescence Introduction Dual strategy frameworks of motivation to lead differentiate Dominance motivations, which leverage fear and control to gain power and status, from Prestige motivations, which rely on re...

Speaking of early leadership motivations, I'm thrilled that this paper is finally out - we establish the emergence of dominance and prestige leadership motivations in adolescence, and further show nomological networks identical to young adults

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Paper now out in the special issue of JEP:G @apajournals.bsky.social on Political Thinking (editors: Boli Reyes-Jaquez & Tamar Kushnir)

psycnet.apa.org/PsycARTICLES...

8/8

Grateful to my wonderful collaborators @rachelesh.bsky.social, @reutshachnai.bsky.social (co-first authors), @yuchentian.bsky.social, & Minghui Wang

Free pdf: drive.google.com/file/d/1_m9Q...

7/8

A practical implication (with many caveats: cross-sectional, convenience samples, self-report):

Encouraging girls' political aspirations early -- through family, friends, and community -- may help reduce gender gaps in political ambition.

6/8

To examine whether the traits constitute psychometrically distinct facets of children’s concepts of political leaders, we submitted all 20 items to a factor analysis (with principal axis factoring as the extraction method) separately for the U.S. and Chinese samples. The purpose of the factor analysis was to examine whether children conceptualize political leaders along dimensions previously established in the adult literature. To maintain our bottom-up approach and capture the full range of traits that might shape children’s concepts of political leaders, we included both the obligatory and the permissible traits in a single factor analysis rather than analyzing them separately. Parallel analyses (Horn, 1965) identified a three-factor solution as the best fit to the data in both countries. The traits that loaded onto each factor in this solution after an oblique rotation overlapped substantially across the two countries (see Table 2). Thus, to allow for descriptive comparisons between the United States and China, we selected the traits that loaded at .30 or higher onto the same factor in both countries and averaged their endorsement to form three composite measures of children’s concepts.

How kids conceived of political leaders -- along three dimensions (dominance, charisma, fallibility) -- did not relate to their ambitions. Their concepts didn't consistently predict motivation in either country.

For those of you who like data, here is our factor analysis of kids' concepts.

5/8

Overall, children in the United States and China expected moderate to high levels of social support for their leadership ambitions (see Supplemental Table S1), with marked differences by gender and, in the United States, age. In the United States, older children anticipated more social support than younger ones (b = 0.08, SE = 0.02, p < .001; see Figure 1), and girls anticipated more social support than boys (b = 0.22, SE = 0.09, p = .021). Among Chinese children, we found a gender difference in the opposite direction to that observed in the United States. That is, Chinese boys expected to receive more social support than Chinese girls (b = −0.24, SE = 0.10, p = .019; see Figure 1).

US girls expected more support than boys. Chinese girls expected less.

But -- again -- in both places, support was more strongly linked to ambition for girls.

4/8

Figure 4 U.S. (Left) and Chinese (Right) Children’s Self-Efficacy as Political Leaders (Relative to an Other-Gender Peer) as a Function of Gender and Anticipated Social Support. With respect to children’s interest in political leadership, we observed that in the United States, the more social support children perceived for their political ambitions, the more interest they reported in becoming president (b = 0.59, SE = 0.12, p < .001). Importantly, this relation was qualified by a three-way interaction among age, gender, and perceived social support (b = –0.25, SE = 0.12, p = .045; see Figure 3). To interpret this interaction, we examined the two-way interaction between gender and anticipated social support separately for younger children (below the median age of 8.36 years) and older children (above this median age). Among younger children, anticipated social support was significantly associated with both boys’ and girls’ interest in becoming president, but it was more than twice as strong a predictor for girls (b = 1.05, SE = 0.22, p < .001) than for boys (b = 0.42, SE = 0.18, p = .019). For older children, perceived social support did not significantly predict either boys’ or girls’ interest in becoming president (ps > .099). In China, we observed a similarly strong positive relation between perceived social support and interest as we did in the United States. That is, the more social support children perceived for their political leadership aspirations, the stronger their reported interest in becoming chairman (b = 0.51, SE = 0.14, p < .001; see Figure 3). Unlike in the United States, however, this relation was not moderated by children’s gender or age (ps > .24).

Figure 4. U.S. (Left) and Chinese (Right) Children’s Self-Efficacy as Political Leaders (Relative to an Other-Gender Peer) as a Function of Gender and Anticipated Social Support. With respect to children’s self-efficacy, we observed that in the United States, the more social support children perceived for their political leadership aspirations, the more self-efficacious they felt as future presidents (b = 0.38, SE = 0.10, p < .001; see Figure 4), with no moderation by children’s gender or age (ps > .12). We observed a similar pattern among children in China—that is, the more social support children anticipated, the more self-efficacious they felt as future chairmen—but with moderation by children’s gender (b = 0.62, SE = 0.22, p = .004; see Figure 4). Unpacking this two-way interaction, we found that anticipated social support was a positive predictor of Chinese girls’ self-efficacy as chairmen (b = 0.41, SE = 0.12, p = .001) but was unrelated to Chinese boys’ self-efficacy (b = −0.21, SE = 0.18, p = .23).

Also important:

This link was stronger for girls than boys.

For example, among younger US kids, the association between anticipated support and interest in becoming president was more than twice as large for girls.

3/8

We looked at two factors:

1) how kids think about political leaders

2) the social support they expect for their own political aspirations

Main finding:

Kids who expected support from family and friends reported higher political ambition. This held in both countries.

2/8