Andrei Cimpian

@andreicimpian.bsky.social

456 Followers 193 Following

Professor, Department of Psychology, New York University Research: gender, stereotypes, motivation, explanation Past President, @cogdevsoc.bsky.social Married to @joecimpian.bsky.social Website: https://cimpianlab.com

Decades of research on motivation shows that students’ beliefs about ability shape how they interpret difficulty and whether they persist after setbacks. Much of this work, and its translation into education policy, has focused on adolescents and on one belief in particular: whether ability is fixed or malleable. Recent research challenges both emphases. Ability beliefs take shape well before adolescence: Children as young as 4 already reason in systematic, sensible ways about success and failure, and by the early elementary years they hold a coherent, multidimensional “ecosystem” of beliefs about ability. This ecosystem includes not only beliefs about malleability but also beliefs about the necessity of “brilliance” for success and the universality of high-level potential. These early beliefs are already linked to children's goals (e.g., to learn vs. to look competent), willingness to take on challenges, and concerns about being judged. They are also shaped by the cues children encounter in classrooms, and they intersect with societal stereotypes to shape early interests relevant to later career pursuit. The present review discusses implications for education policy, including teacher preparation and institutional practices that send signals about ability. Research investments are needed to support evidence-based policy decisions.

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

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.

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.

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).

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).

Endorsement of Ingroup’s Claims in Study 3 as a Function of Condition. Solid circles represent predicted means, and error bars represent standard errors from the mixed-effects logistic regression model. Empty circles represent child-specific proportions of endorsing ingroup versus outgroup claims (ranging from 0 [always endorsing outgroup claims] to 1 [always endorsing ingroup claims]), separated by condition. ns = not significant. *p < .05. ***p < .001.

Endorsement of Ingroup’s Claims in Study 2 as a Function of Condition. Solid circles represent predicted means, and error bars represent standard errors from the mixed-effects logistic regression model. Empty circles represent child-specific proportions of endorsing ingroup versus outgroup claims (ranging from 0 [always endorsing outgroup claims] to 1 [always endorsing ingroup claims]), separated by condition. ns = not significant.

Endorsement of Ingroup’s Claims in Study 1 as a Function of Condition and Trial Clarity. Solid circles represent predicted means, and error bars represent standard errors from the mixed-effects logistic regression model. Empty circles represent child-specific proportions of endorsing ingroup versus outgroup claims (ranging from 0 [always endorsing outgroup claims] to 1 [always endorsing ingroup claims]), separated by trial clarity and condition. ns = not significant. *p < .05.

Overview of Procedure and Stimuli from Study 1

Scientific explanation is one of the most sophisticated forms of human reasoning. Nevertheless, here we hypothesize that scientific explanation is susceptible to some of the same biases that influence everyday thinking—particularly during the initial stages of theory building, when scientists are first grappling with complex phenomena and are thus more likely to rely on explanatory “guesses.” Specifically, we investigated whether scientific explanation exhibits an inherence bias—a tendency to explain phenomena through inherent or intrinsic features rather than extrinsic factors such as context or relations. Consistent with this hypothesis, a comprehensive analysis of major explanatory transitions across the history of Western science revealed that initial scientific explanations systematically favored inherent properties, while subsequent explanations incorporated extrinsic factors more consistently. Seven experiments with lay participants (both adults and children; N
1,673) and two experiments with practicing scientists from top departments worldwide (N
275) provided converging evidence for this bias and identified the psychological mechanisms involved. When explaining unfamiliar phenomena, even leading scientists showed a robust tendency to overweight inherent properties and underweight extrinsic factors relative to established scientific understanding. This bias appears rooted in basic cognitive constraints on attention and memory that excessively narrow the space of hypotheses initially considered.

Historical and experimental evidence that inherent properties are overweighted in early scientific explanation

Self-Efficacy, Interest, and Anxiety as a Function of Gender Stereotypes about Required Effort

Younger Children Believe Their Own Gender Has to Work Less Hard than the Gender Outgroup to be Good in Math and Reading

Our culture attributes women’s and girls’ ability in mathematics and related domains to their efforts more so than men’s and boys’—a stereotype that contributes to inequities in scientific and technical careers. Here, we provide the first investigation of this gender stereotype in children, examining its endorsement across a broad age range and assessing its links to student motivation. Specifically, we investigated 6- to 12-year-old U.S. elementary school students’ stereotypes about how hard girls and boys have to work to be good at math and, as a comparison, reading (N = 246; 50% girls; 50% White, 19% Asian, 9% Multiracial, 6% Black). We also tested whether these stereotypes are related to children’s self-efficacy, interest, and anxiety in math and reading, and whether these links differ in strength across age. Although we anticipated that, like U.S. adults, children would stereotype girls as having to work harder than boys to be good at math, we found that—in line with previously documented gender ingroup biases—younger children reported that effort was less of a requirement for their own (vs. another) gender; this ingroup bias was absent among older children. However, consistent with our hypotheses, children who more strongly believed their own gender needed to work harder to be good in a subject also reported lower self-efficacy in that subject, and older children reported lower interest in it as well. The present research contributes to our understanding of how to effectively encourage student motivation in school.

Adults hold a broad range of beliefs about intellectual ability. Key examples include beliefs about its malleability, its distribution in the population, whether high levels of it (“brilliance”) are necessary for success, its origins, and its responsiveness to intervention. Here, we examined the structure and motivational significance of this network of consequential beliefs in a sample of elementary school-age children (5- to 11-year-olds, N = 231; 116 girls, 112 boys, three gender nonbinary children; predominantly White and Asian children from relatively high-income backgrounds). We assessed five beliefs: (a) growth mindsets (malleability), (b) universal mindsets (distribution), (c) brilliance beliefs (necessity for success), and beliefs about ability’s (d) innateness and (e) responsiveness to intervention. Even among the youngest children, these beliefs were empirically distinguishable and also largely coherent, in that they related to each other in expected ways. Moreover, the five beliefs assessed here were differentially related to children’s learning (vs. performance) goals, preference for challenging tasks, and evaluative concern (i.e., concern that mistakes will lead others to evaluate the self negatively). Even when adjusting for age, children with growth mindsets were oriented toward learning goals and preferred challenging tasks; children who believed ability has innate origins preferred performance goals; and younger (but not older) children who thought success required brilliance expressed more concern over being evaluated. These findings speak to the multifaceted nature of children’s concepts of ability and highlight their significance for children’s achievement-related attitudes and behavior in the early school years.