Scholars@Duke
Tamar Kushnir

Tamar Kushnir

Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Psychology & Neuroscience
tamar.kushnir@duke.edu
2200 West Main St., Suite 800, Durham, NC 27705
2200 West Main St., Suite 800, Durham, NC 27705

Scholarly Works - Journal articles

Children expect prior belief strength to constrain belief revision.

Journal article Cognition · July 2026 Across two preregistered studies (N = 199), we investigate whether children's developing theory of mind incorporates assumptions that people revise their beliefs rationally. Specifically, we focus on the role of prior belief strength (magnitude of and degr ... Full text Cite

The cognitive foundations of food moralization.

Journal article Appetite · July 2026 By adulthood, we attach moral valence to food-labeling some foods as "good," others as "bad," and judging ourselves and others based on the foods we choose. Here, we examined young children's beliefs about which foods are permissible to eat and whether the ... Full text Cite

Reasoning Beyond Explicit Rules: Adults' and Children's Use of Closure Principles in Novel Cases.

Journal article Cognitive science · June 2026 Learners often encounter situations where explicit rules fail to account for novel cases, leading to an underdetermination problem. One way to explore how learners navigate this uncertainty is to see if their inferences align with closure principles, throu ... Full text Cite

Political thinking: How social and cognitive factors shape stances across the life course.

Journal article Journal of experimental psychology. General · January 2026 Work on issues such as when political stances emerge, and the social and cognitive factors that influence their development or entrenchment with age, is ongoing across different disciplines. However, there is a need for integration and synthesis of these i ... Full text Cite

But Why?: Children's belief in the necessity of explanations.

Journal article Journal of experimental child psychology · December 2025 Children exhibit sophisticated explanatory judgments: they expect, value, and judge explanations of salient facts. Do children also believe that everything must have an explanation? If so, they would exhibit a metaphysical explanatory judgment conforming t ... Full text Cite

Children's cost-benefit analysis about agents who act for the greater good.

Journal article Cognition · March 2025 Acting for the greater good often involves paying a personal cost to benefit the collective. In two studies, we investigate how children (N = 184, Mage = 8.02 years, SD = 1.15, Range = 6.00-9.99 years) use information about costs and consequence ... Full text Cite

Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White: Children Appreciate Reasoners Who Approach Moral Dilemmas With Humility.

Journal article Developmental science · January 2025 Moral decisions often involve dilemmas: cases of conflict between competing obligations. In two studies (N = 204), we ask whether children appreciate that reasoning through dilemmas involves acknowledging that there is no single, simple solution. In Study ... Full text Cite

Working across religions, cultures, settings, and development: Protocol for wave 2 data collection with children and parents by the developing belief network.

Journal article PloS one · January 2025 The Developing Belief Network is a global research collaborative studying religious development in diverse social-cultural settings, with a focus on the intersection of cognitive mechanisms and cultural beliefs and practices in early and middle childhood. ... Full text Cite

School-age children are more skeptical of inaccurate robots than adults.

Journal article Cognition · August 2024 We expect children to learn new words, skills, and ideas from various technologies. When learning from humans, children prefer people who are reliable and trustworthy, yet children also forgive people's occasional mistakes. Are the dynamics of children lea ... Full text Cite

Being me in times of change: Young children's reflections on their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic

Journal article Children and Society · July 1, 2024 Research from the perspective of parents, educators and mental health professionals has documented the negative impacts of pandemic isolation on children, but few studies have sought children's own perspectives on this difficult year. The current study aim ... Full text Cite

Is it personal or is it social? The interaction of knowledge domain and statistical evidence in U.S. and Chinese preschoolers' social generalizations.

Journal article Journal of experimental psychology. General · July 2024 Children make inferences about the social world by observing human actions. However, human actions can be ambiguous: They can be sources of information about personal, idiosyncratic characteristics of individuals or socially shared knowledge. In two cross- ... Full text Cite

Testimony and observation of statistical evidence interact in adults' and children's category-based induction.

Journal article Cognition · March 2024 Hearing generic or other kind-relevant claims can influence the use of information from direct observations in category learning. In the current study, we ask how both adults and children integrate their observations with testimony when learning about the ... Full text Cite

Children are eager to take credit for prosocial acts, and cost affects this tendency.

Journal article Journal of experimental child psychology · January 2024 We report two experiments on children's tendency to enhance their reputations through communicative acts. In the experiments, 4-year-olds (N = 120) had the opportunity to inform a social partner that they had helped him in his absence. In a first experimen ... Full text Cite

The development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior: Protocol for Wave 1 data collection with children and parents by the Developing Belief Network.

Journal article PloS one · January 2024 The Developing Belief Network is a consortium of researchers studying human development in diverse social-cultural settings, with a focus on the interplay between general cognitive development and culturally specific processes of socialization and cultural ... Full text Cite

How children learn to transcend limits: Developmental pathways to possibility beliefs

Journal article Possibility Studies & Society · December 2023 This review presents a theoretical account of the development of possibility beliefs in childhood through two developmental pathways, centered around the experience and understanding of our intentional, goal-directed actions. Pathway 1 (Naïve Optim ... Full text Cite

A Review of “Becoming Human”

Journal article Journal of Cognition and Development · August 8, 2023 Full text Open Access Cite

Building representations of the social world: Children extract patterns from social choices to reason about multi-group hierarchies.

Journal article Developmental science · July 2023 How do children learn about the structure of the social world? We tested whether children would extract patterns from an agent's social choices to make inferences about multiple groups' relative social standing. In Experiment 1, 4- to 6-year-old children ( ... Full text Cite

The minds of machines: Children's beliefs about the experiences, thoughts, and morals of familiar interactive technologies.

Journal article Developmental psychology · June 2023 Children are developing alongside interactive technologies that can move, talk, and act like agents, but it is unclear if children's beliefs about the agency of these household technologies are similar to their beliefs about advanced, humanoid robots used ... Full text Cite

Rational learners and parochial norms.

Journal article Cognition · April 2023 Parochial norms are narrow in social scope, meaning they apply to certain groups but not to others. Accounts of norm acquisition typically invoke tribal biases: from an early age, people assume a group's behavioral regularities are prescribed and bounded b ... Full text Cite

When it's not easy to do the right thing: Developmental changes in understanding cost drive evaluations of moral praiseworthiness.

Journal article Developmental science · January 2023 Recent work identified a shift in judgments of moral praiseworthiness that occurs late in development: adults recognize the virtue of moral actions that involve resolving an inner conflict between moral desires and selfish desires. Children, in contrast, p ... Full text Open Access Cite

Walking in Her Shoes: Pretending to Be a Female Role Model Increases Young Girls' Persistence in Science.

Journal article Psychological science · November 2022 Pretend play is a ubiquitous learning tool in early childhood, enabling children to explore possibilities outside of their current reality. Here, we demonstrate how pretend play can be leveraged to empower girls in scientific domains. American children age ... Full text Cite

Imagination and social cognition in childhood.

Journal article Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · July 2022 Imagination is a cognitive process used to generate new ideas from old, not just in the service of creativity and fantasy, but also in our ordinary thoughts about alternatives to current reality. In this article, I argue for the central function of imagina ... Full text Cite

Face-to-face learning enhances the social transmission of information.

Journal article PloS one · January 2022 Learning from others provides the foundation for culture and the advancement of knowledge. Learning a new visuospatial skill from others represents a specific challenge-overcoming differences in perspective so that we understand what someone is doing and w ... Full text Cite

Children's Developing Beliefs About Agency and Free Will in an Increasingly Technological World

Journal article Humana Mente · January 1, 2022 The idea of treating robots as free agents seems only to have existed in the realm of science fiction. In our current world, however, children are interacting with robotic technologies that look, talk, and act like agents. Are children willing to treat suc ... Cite

Social sampling: Children track social choices to reason about status hierarchies.

Journal article Journal of Experimental Psychology: General · February 2021 Full text Cite

The Community-Engaged Lab: A Case-Study Introduction for Developmental Science.

Journal article Frontiers in psychology · January 2021 Due to the closing of campuses, museums, and other public spaces during the pandemic, the typical avenues for recruitment, partnership, and dissemination are now unavailable to developmental labs. In this paper, we show how a shift in perspective has impac ... Full text Open Access Cite

The developmental and cultural psychology of free will

Journal article Philosophy Compass · July 2018 Full text Cite

The choice is yours: Infants' expectations about an agent's future behavior based on taking and receiving actions.

Journal article Developmental psychology · May 2018 Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and indepen ... Full text Cite

Infants Use Statistical Sampling to Understand the Psychological World

Journal article Infancy · September 1, 2016 Preverbal infants engage in statistical and probabilistic inference to learn about their linguistic and physical worlds. Do they also employ probabilistic information to understand their social world? Do they infer underlying causal mechanisms from statist ... Full text Cite

Children protest moral and conventional violations more when they believe actions are freely chosen

Journal article Journal of Experimental Child Psychology · January 2016 Full text Cite

Development links psychological causes to evolutionary explanations

Journal article Behavioral and Brain Sciences · April 2014 Full text Cite

Knowledge matters: how children evaluate the reliability of testimony as a process of rational inference.

Journal article Psychological review · October 2013 Children's causal learning has been characterized as a rational process, in which children appropriately evaluate evidence from their observations and actions in light of their existing conceptual knowledge. We propose a similar framework for children's se ... Full text Cite

A comparison of American and Nepalese children's concepts of freedom of choice and social constraint.

Journal article Cognitive science · September 2013 Recent work has shown that preschool-aged children and adults understand freedom of choice regardless of culture, but that adults across cultures differ in perceiving social obligations as constraints on action. To investigate the development of these cult ... Full text Cite

Giving Preschoolers Choice Increases Sharing Behavior

Journal article Psychological Science · August 2013 Full text Cite

Infants Are Rational Constructivist Learners

Journal article Current Directions in Psychological Science · February 2013 Full text Cite

Understanding the adult moralist requires first understanding the child scientist

Journal article Behavioral and Brain Sciences · August 2010 Full text Cite

Inferring Hidden Causal Structure

Journal article Cognitive Science · October 2009 Full text Cite

The importance of decision making in causal learning from interventions.

Journal article Memory & cognition · March 2006 Recent research has focused on how interventions benefit causal learning. This research suggests that the main benefit of interventions is in the temporal and conditional probability information that interventions provide a learner. But when one generates ... Full text Cite

Young Children Infer Causal Strength From Probabilities and Interventions

Journal article Psychological Science · September 2005 Full text Cite