Journal of Experimental Psychology: General最新文献

Citizens' willingness to participate in political and civic life is crucial for democracies. The Civic Voluntarism Model has frequently been used to explain political participation by emphasizing citizens' resources, psychological engagement, and recruiting as important antecedents. While the model has received extensive support from cross-sectional studies among adults, we know little about its explanatory power for the development of adolescents' willingness to participate. Thus, this study aims to determine whether and how adolescents' resources (i.e., political knowledge, socioeconomic background, cultural capital), psychological engagement (political interest and efficacy), and recruitment (peers' participatory attitudes, discussions, and school track) are related to the development of three types of willingness to participate (civic engagement, activism, voting) among high school students from Grade 7 to 8. For this purpose, we performed cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses with data from N = 444 students. Overall, our structural equation models indicated positive associations between the Civic Voluntarism Model components and willingness to participate, with considerable variation between the cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. For the cross-sectional analyses, we found positive associations between political interest and all examined forms of willingness to participate. In the longitudinal analyses, we found that socioeconomic background was related to all forms of willingness to participate. The results for other factors varied depending on the type of political participation. Future studies should strive to systematically investigate these differences and inspect the specific interplay between factors. The consistent longitudinal findings on socioeconomic status point to the need to counteract political inequality through measures such as civic education. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

What political party or what presidential candidate a person supports is often used by adults to divide their social world. However, little is known about whether young children also engage in such tendencies or whether political groups are even socially meaningful for young children. To trace the beginnings of these tendencies, the present study investigated whether 6- to 12-year-old U.S. children use political markers, such as political party affiliation and support for presidential candidates, to guide their social preferences. We also examined children's ability to report their political affiliation, whether their political affiliation matched their parents', how accurate they are at reporting their parents' political affiliations, and whether having parent-child conversations about politics predicted children's political affiliation and social preferences. We found that children as young as 6 years of age showed ingroup preferences for individuals who shared their own or their parents' political affiliations-especially based on support for presidential candidates. Notably, even if children could not report their own presidential candidate choice or were inaccurate at predicting their parents' presidential candidate choice, children still preferred people who supported the same presidential candidate as their parents. Further, children who had conversations with their parents about politics were more likely to prefer people who matched their parents' political affiliations. This study provides the first empirical evidence that 6- to 12-year-old children are using political markers to form ingroup preferences and show rudimentary forms of political partisanship. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Tensions between merit-based and egalitarian forms of material distribution underlie some of the most consequential sociopolitical debates in modern history (Starmans et al., 2017). The present research examines how children, adolescents, and adults in the United States (total N = 173) reason about these practices and their implications. Participants were asked to make inferences about two organizations where employees had the same job and total compensation across all employees was matched. In a merit-based organization, this total was divided up based on work completed (a zero-sum system). In an egalitarian organization, everyone received the same level of compensation. Across two studies, there was strong evidence that participants of all age groups thought individuals operating under the merit-based system would work harder. There was also some evidence that they associated the merit-based system with higher levels of interpersonal conflict. These findings indicate that from childhood to adulthood, people recognize that merit-based compensation systems can bring both opportunities and challenges. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Women are underrepresented in positions of political leadership across the world. One reason for this disparity is a gender gap in political ambition, which seems to emerge reliably as children transition from childhood to adolescence. Why does this gap in political ambition arise? The present study (N = 367 children ages 5-11 from the United States and China; 180 girls, 187 boys) provided a cross-cultural investigation of two potential antecedents of this ambition gap: (a) children's concepts of political leaders, which might discourage girls' ambitions if they emphasize traditionally masculine traits, and (b) the social support children anticipate receiving for their political ambitions, which might be lower for girls due to gender role expectations. In both the United States and China, children's concepts of political leaders-which were characterized by the same three underlying dimensions (prestige/charisma, dominance/assertiveness, vulnerability/fallibility)-did not consistently predict children's political ambition. However, the level of social support for their political leadership pursuits, which was higher for girls than boys in the United States and vice versa in China, did predict levels of political ambition in both countries, particularly for girls. That is, anticipated social support robustly predicted girls' motivation to pursue political leadership in both the United States and China, whereas this link was weaker and less consistent for boys. Together, these findings provide new insight into the sources of gender gaps in political ambition and, in doing so, bring us a step closer to understanding how to remedy the persistent gender imbalances in political leadership. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

In a just society, who should have a voice in group decision making? Should everyone get to decide, or only the most elite and competent individuals? We probed the foundational intuitions underlying these important societal questions through a developmental lens, examining how adults and 4- to 9-year-old children evaluate universalist versus exclusive decision-making systems that could potentially have better decision effectiveness and efficiency. Study 1 found that compared to expert-led exclusive voting, children and adults preferred universal systems and thought they were fairer. Study 2 found similar patterns even when we emphasized the decisions as important and consequential. We also introduced a moral-led exclusive voting system and found that, with age children increasingly believed the universalist system was more fair than both expert-led and moral-led exclusive systems, although they acknowledged the exclusive systems could yield better outcomes (in line with adult responding). Study 3 further investigated evaluations of exclusive systems based on incompetence, immoral behaviors, or arbitrary characteristics. Children and adults regarded immorality-based exclusions as the fairest type of exclusion, followed by incompetence-based and then arbitrary exclusions. Across studies, with age, children increasingly recognized that exclusive voting systems were faster than universal voting, demonstrating an awareness of the trade-offs between inclusiveness and efficiency. These results reveal an early emerging preference for universalist voting and a growing sophistication in children's thinking about fair decision-making systems in society. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).