Across societies, housework is disproportionately performed by women and systematically undervalued. Even preschool children recognize this gendered division and normalize it. Our lab examines how children reason about the inequality of housework division, how they increasingly devalue housework with age, and how these understandings relate to their broader social cognition, including development of fairness concept and their expectations for the future.

Children start to form their own value system around work, and these beliefs shape their expectations and imagination of future occupations from an early age. Our lab investigates how children develop judgments about the value of different kinds of work, and why certain forms of labor are systematically undervalued. The central aim is to understand how children come to evaluate occupational worth, and how social hierarchies and occupational inequality may be naturalized from an early age.

We study how monolingual and bilingual children think about the people and groups around them to understand how growing up with language diversity shapes the way children learn about and navigate their social world. We also study bilingual children in different cultural contexts, including India, to understand which aspects of children’s social development are shaped by bilingualism and which reflect broader cultural experiences.

Children navigate through social group hierarchies from early life (e.g., captains of sport teams or leaders in classrooms) and understanding how these hierarchies function gives them important information such as who to follow or who to trust. This line of research seeks to answer questions such as how do children select who leads a group? What do they expect from someone who leads a group? We study what sources of information children weigh heavier (such as taking into account majority ruling, or perhaps prioritize if it comes from someone with authority) in their preferences for leadership selection.