Research on children’s reasoning about social mobility has focused on individual or family characteristics, neglecting to delineate the role of community contexts. To address this gap, 5-17-year-old children living in a concentrated poverty community estimated the likelihood of upward social mobility for pairs of families across 4 conditions. Children (current n=33, anticipated N=120, Mage=9.8) expected families in higher (vs. lower) quality housing (b=2.00, SE=0.22 , t = 8.98, p<.001), in less (vs. more) socially disordered communities (b=2.85, SE=0.22 , t=12.78, p<.001), and, surprisingly, in subsidized (vs. non-subsidized) housing (b=-1.22, SE=0.22 , t=-5.48, p<.001) to be more likely to experience upward mobility, with no significant differences in the community income segregation condition, nor across age. Results suggest that children can use information about housing and community contexts to infer the likelihood of upward mobility, with potential implications for how children apply these intuitions to their own experiences and future possibilities.

When learning about others' behaviors, individuals form first impressions, often inferring character traits and attributing them to observed actors. Across several studies, we examined the impact of directed forgetting—applied to either actors (list-method) or specific behaviors (item-method)—on behavior recall, actor evaluations, trait inferences, and predictions of future behaviors. While participants successfully forgot behaviors under directed forgetting instructions, altering initial impressions proved more challenging. In the list-method paradigm, forgetting instructions reduced negative evaluations of the to-be-forgotten actors. However, in the item-method paradigm, participants continued to endorse traits linked to forgotten behaviors, as evidenced by false recognition of inferred traits and enhanced learning of behavior-consistent traits in a paired-associates task. Notably, inferred traits had a diminished impact on future behavior predictions in the forget condition. These findings shed light on the complex relationship between memory processes and social cognition, providing insight into mechanisms influencing the modification and potential updating of first impressions.

How do people estimate the prevalence of beliefs and knowledge among others? Here, we test the hypothesis that mere repetition of information increases such perceptions of consensus — an “illusory consensus effect." In Experiment 1 (N = 101 US-based Prolific participants), we found that mere repetition increases perceptions of how many other Americans would believe it, and in Experiment 2 (N = 100), we found that mere repetition increases perceptions of current public knowledge. Thus, repetition increases perceptions that socially similar others believe or know information. In ongoing work, we test whether this illusory consensus effect extends to outgroup members. Specifically, we test how repeating polarized information (consistent with Republican or Democrat beliefs) affects perceptions of its consensus among political ingroup and outgroup members. This work sheds light on how our information environments may contribute to (mis)perceptions of consensus and the role of this exposure on perceived political polarization.

Observers spontaneously divide other's activities into meaningful events via a process called event segmentation. Although multiple factors likely contribute to segmentation, event boundaries are often identified when an actor's goals or actions change. Yet, how observers identify action and goal changes is under-characterized, with most work on event segmentation assuming that observers identify action and goal changes that inform event segmentation beyond the contributions of low-level visual features. To address this issue, we asked participants to identify action changes, goal changes, and event boundaries as they viewed everyday activities recorded from a first-person or third-person perspective. Participants identified action and goal changes consistently and in a manner that was not accounted for by low-level features of the videos. Further, the action and goal changes they identified corresponded to event boundaries. Goal and action changes may therefore be used by untrained observers to segment everyday experiences into meaningful events.