Rodney Tompkins

How Colorblind and Structural Messages Affect Children's Reasoning About Novel Group Disparities Children experience a variety of messages about racial–ethnic socialization from their parents, teachers, and other sources, who might not answer children's questions about race, or might explicitly...

some parents, esp white parents, fail to answer their children's questions about race or provide colorblind messages ("race is not important"). but are these effective? 🗣️ we find they aren't! structural explanations seem to be more constructive (1/5) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

In the running for greatest human accomplishment.

Motivational context does not influence children’s third-party punishment in intergroup contexts Children punish to reciprocate harm (retributive motives) and to prevent future wrongdoing (consequentialist motives). Building on this idea, we wante…

Excited to share our new paper in Cognitive Development! We replicate that children punish for both retributive and consequentialist reasons — and, surprisingly, intergroup context doesn’t change these effects. tinyurl.com/ycyhcn5a Check in out! ✨

How physical information is used to make sense of the psychological world - Nature Reviews Psychology Reasoning about minds and reasoning about physical objects are governed by two distinct systems. In this Perspective, Liu et al. review research from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscienc...

New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Abstract for "The truly isolated: Spatial isolation of advantage in the United States" by Shannon Rieger, Angela Li, and Patrick Sharkey, published at Urban Studies

👉 Our new paper uses daily mobility data to show that spatial isolation is much more common today among those living in advantaged neighborhoods than the converse.

👩🏻‍💻 Lots of massive data wrangling and careful assumptions about mobility data needed - but check it out here! doi.org/10.1177/0042...

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Our 52nd Annual Meeting will be held from June 18–20, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, with a pre-conference on Mental Control and Agency held at JHU on June 17
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We are currently inviting submissions of papers (talks and posters)!

Are you a US-based PhD student WITHOUT summer funding who is interested in adolescent development, trans youth, and/or gender? Reach out to me about applying to join my lab in Summer 2026 for the VIPS program! psych.princeton.edu/diversity/vi...

We are recruiting a lab manager/research assistant to start in early 2026! The successful candidate will conduct awake infant fMRI, meet cute babies, and join a fun team!

More details (e.g. responsibilities): soc.stanford.edu/people/#join...

Apply here: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...

Numerical Cognition

Happy to share this new entry on numerical cognition for the OECS. Thanks to @hbaum.bsky.social and @mcxfrank.bsky.social for making this happen! Apologies if your work isn’t cited! Had to limit cites!!! oecs.mit.edu/pub/rek9756r...

Shopping for a hot take on nativism? Here's an argument that "strong nativist" accounts of concepts (here, numerical concepts) often fail to explain ontogenesis because they lack an account of "rational causation" - i.e., how innate contents are brought to bear in experience osf.io/preprints/ps...

Exact numerical reasoning in blind children and adults What is the origin of exact numerical reasoning in humans? Previous studies report that innumerate humans are unable to recognize that two sets placed…

Just in: @drbarner.bsky.social & I find that blind adults and children who have symbols for large numbers, and use 1:1 correspondence to count, do not extend a similar 1:1 strategy to a set-matching task, which assesses their knowledge of Hume’s principle. A 🧵:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs The selective revision of beliefs in light of new evidence has been considered one of the hallmarks of human-level rationality. However, tests of this ability in other species are lacking. We examined...

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

New article w/ M Pabla & @orifriedman.bsky.social

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

When children claim an unexpected event is impossible they also claim it's never happened, even for immoral events, suggesting their judgments reflect beliefs about what could happen & not merely what should.

Excited to announce DID lab's first paper!

psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

We find that children as young as 6 show political ingroup preference!

First paper of very talented @annie-schw.bsky.social!

In JEP: General's special issue on political development (1/3)

We’re recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join our team! 🎉

I’m happy to share that I’ve opened back up the search for this position (it was temporarily closed due to funding uncertainty).

See lab page and doc below for details!

UCSB Campus. Meadow in the foreground with Storke Tower and mountains in the distance

Spread the word: I'm looking to recruit a PhD student for Fall 2026 to @ucsb.bsky.social! Reach out if you are applying this cycle and hoping to study infant and child social cognition, specifically expectations about friendship and/or groups. Bonus: live in paradise! And.. 1/3

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

New work! Kristin Shutts and I review how help can in some cases backfire and lead to detriments in children’s self-views, views of others, and motivation, especially when help is distributed unequally. Check it out here (open access!):
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Title page of the paper "Merging in Close Relationships"

Excited to share a new paper in Current Directions on the theme of merging in close relationships, with @emmamcgorray.bsky.social, @erinhughes.bsky.social , and @abdoe.bsky.social! In the paper, we discuss merging in the domains of selves, goals, processing, and reality. tinyurl.com/ynbedzys (1/4)

continuum of inductive potential from low (relatively minimal categories whose members are dissimilar) to high (coherent meaningful categories whose members are similar) above a cartoon child. an icon of a tiger appears under "high" inductive potential, with "closes eyes when happy" appearing as a feature of a tiger in a zoo, with an arrow pointing to the tiger icon, and a dashed arrow extending it to a tiger on a savanna. an icon of a pedestrian appears under "low" inductive potential, with "closes eyes when happy" appearing as a feature of a woman on a street, with Xs over arrows pointing to the pedestrian icon, and to a different pedestrian.

📣 new paper! people use some categories to generalize (e.g., we generalize something we learn about one tiger 🐯 to other tigers 🐅), but not others (e.g., we don't generalize from one pedestrian 🚶 to other pedestrians 🚶‍♂️). how do people learn what categories allow for generalization? 🧵

On Wednesday: Adena Schachner, talk: "Intuitive Archeology: Social reasoning from the physical world”, W ~10 am, Fourth Level (Pacific) Room A. Chaolan Lin & Adena Schachner, poster: "How children explore and detect augmented reality filters", W 10-11 am, Fourth level (Pacific) Room E. On Thursday: Amy Nguyễn, Rodney Tompkins & Adena Schachner, poster, "When walls talk: People make social inferences from towns’ protective features", Th 1:00-2:15, P1-T-194 On Saturday: Chaolan Lin & Adena Schachner, poster, "Perceived musicality in an android increases positive social attributions", Sat 1:00-2:15, P3-L-113 Shirley Liu, Craig McKenzie & Adena Schachner, poster, "When Default Options Explain Away Preferences: A Causal Reasoning Account of Mental State Reasoning from Default Options ", Sat 1:00-2:15, P3-L-11

I and my lab are happy to be at #cogsci2025! Here's a shortcut to find work from the fabulous folks in my lab (and me) 😄

A list of the SoCal Lab's presentations at CogSci. In brief: Lindsey Powell is giving talks in Workshop 1 on July 30 at 9:30 am and in Symposium 1 on July 31. Tori Hennessy is giving a talk in the Development of Social Cognition 1 session on July 31. Bill Pepe is giving a talk in the Development of Social Cognition session on August 1. Coxi Jiang is giving a talk in the Emotion session on August 1. Rodney Tompkins is presenting a poster in Session 2 on August 1.

The SoCal Lab is headed to #cogsci2025 this week! Here's where you can find us:

A new piece - well, almost a whole book! - by our team, reflecting more than a decade of work.

New preprint! Led by Bill Pepe, with @brandonwoo.bsky.social and @ashleyjthomas.bsky.social. We asked if infants think helping and hindering stem from actors' dispositions (i.e. good/nice v bad/mean) or their social relationships, by testing expectations for future behavior: osf.io/preprints/ps...

⭐ Out now in Developmental Science ⭐

"Sounds of Hidden Agents: The development of causal reasoning about musical sounds"

(by Minju Kim and me)

causal reasoning, music/auditory cognition, event reconstruction, kids' integration of information...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Junior Specialist-Lab for Infant Learning And Cognition (LILAC), Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences University of California Santa Barbara is hiring. Apply now!

I'm hiring a full-time #labmanager for my new Lab for Infant Learning and Cognition (LILAC) at UCSB! The start date is flexible, but could be as early as August 1, 2025. Application review begins July 17th and will continue until the position is filled 👶🪴

recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF02992

#academicjobs

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

The Comparative Status Hypothesis: Inferences About Discrimination Vary Based on Identity Salience - Elizabeth A. Quinn-Jensen, Anh L. K. Tran, Sara E. Burke, Brenda Major, Zoe Liberman, 2025 Past research examining when people label an outcome as discrimination has largely ignored contextual factors beyond the victim–perpetrator dyad. We contend tha...

Excited that this paper is finally out (in collaboration with @zoeliberman.bsky.social @saraburke.bsky.social & Brenda Major) in PSPB!

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

This paper stems from one of the first projects I worked on as a lab manager, closely following many fruitful discussions during my time as a post-bacc RA! I'm incredibly grateful for my lab communities as well as the many reviewers along the way. Looking forward to hearing what folks think!

With age, people likewise judged the lying friend (vs. classmate) as meaner. This pattern was similar to that for failure to help scenarios (replicating original findings from Marshall, Wynn, and Bloom, 2020, Child Dev).

In comparative contexts directly contrasting the relationships (ridding of alternatives like private interaction and/or extending an olive branch), with age people evaluated it as worse for a friend to lie. Thanks to a helpful reviewer, we also show that this divergence may emerge as early as age 4.