Science, Religion, Culture: Children's Inferences and Evaluations of Others' Beliefs

Previous research shows that children use social cues to infer others' beliefs, use testimony to form beliefs about unobservable entities, and develop beliefs that vary across cultures. In the current study, we investigate how children aged 3-13 infer others' beliefs and make social evaluations based on these beliefs. Generally, how do children navigate belief based social interactions? Children will be introduced to characters with different beliefs across domains, status, and normativity and answer questions about each characters' beliefs and their own beliefs., We coded an online study on Children Helping Science to explore this. We are currently collecting and analyzing data and plan to be finished by the beginning of Spring 2026.