Andrei Cimpian

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Verified

Andrei verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD, Stanford
• Professor (Full) at New York University

Academic fields exhibit substantial levels of gender segregation. Here, we investigated differences in field-specific ability beliefs (FABs) as an explanation for this phenomenon. FABs may contribute to gender segregation to the extent that they portray success as depending on “brilliance” (i.e., exceptional intellectual ability), which is a trait...

Why are some fields and occupations more diverse than others? In this review, we describe a conceptual framework—the Field-specific Ability Beliefs (FAB) model—that provides a promising answer to this question. This model proposes that gender and racial/ethnic imbalances in a field or occupation result in part from the confluence of two beliefs: (a...

Success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is often believed to require intellectual talent (“brilliance”). Given that many cultures associate men more than women with brilliance, this belief poses an obstacle to women's STEM pursuits. Here, we investigated the developmental roots of this phenomenon, focusing specifi...

Girls and women are underrepresented in chess. Here, we explored the role of gender bias in this phenomenon. Specifically, we investigated whether parents and mentors (e.g., coaches) show bias against the female youth players in their lives. Parents and mentors (N = 286; 90.6% men) recruited through the U.S. Chess Federation reported their evaluati...

Discriminatory acts (i.e., harmful acts motivated by the victim’s group membership) have outsize consequences for the victim and for society relative to similar harms committed for other reasons. Here, we investigated the development of children’s evaluations of discrimination. Specifically, we asked whether children in the U.S., like adults, perce...

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 ass...

Communal values (i.e., valuing care for and connection with others) are important to individual well-being and societal functioning yet show marked gender differences, with girls valuing communion more than boys do. We examined whether endorsement of gender stereotypes associating communal values more with girls than with boys relate to children’s...

Women tend to negotiate less than men, which—along with other well-documented interpersonal and structural factors—contributes to persistent gender gaps in pay for equal work. Here, we explore the developmental origins of these gender differences in negotiation. Across three studies (N = 462), we investigated 6- to 12-year-old girls’ and boys’ perc...

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 netwo...

People worldwide tend to believe that their societies are more meritocratic than they actually are. We propose the belief in meritocracy is widespread because it is rooted in simple, seemingly obvious causal–explanatory intuitions. Our proposal suggests solutions for debunking the myth of meritocracy and increasing support for equity-oriented polic...

The expression of intellectual humility—publicly admitting confusion, ignorance, and mistakes—can benefit individuals, but can it also benefit others? Five studies tested the hypothesis that teachers’ expressions of intellectual humility would boost U.S. students’ motivation and engagement in learning. In two pilot studies (one preregistered, combi...

Beliefs about the malleability of intellectual ability—mindsets—shape achievement. Recent evidence suggests that even young children hold such mindsets; yet, no reliable and valid instruments exist for measuring individual differences in young children’s mindsets. Given the potential relevance of mindsets to children’s achievement-related behavior...

Within psychology, the underachievement of students from working-class backgrounds has often been explained as a product of individual characteristics such as a lack of intelligence or motivation. Here, we propose an integrated model illustrating how educational contexts contribute to social class disparities in education over and beyond individual...

A parent-directed intervention designed to foster growth-oriented mindsets about math was evaluated in a longitudinal randomized-control trial. Parents (N = 615; 61% White, 22% Black; 63% with at least a bachelor’s degree) participated in the intervention or an active control condition in which they learned about the Common Core math curriculum. Pa...

When adult men are made to feel gender‐atypical, they often lash out with aggression, particularly when they are pressured (vs. autonomously motivated) to be gender‐typical. Here, we examined the development of this phenomenon. Specifically, we provided a first experimental test of whether threatening adolescent boys’ perceived gender typicality el...

Pronouns often convey information about a person’s social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender nonbinary individuals). Here, we ma...

Role model interventions are often designed to foster students’ pursuit of specific careers and are commonly employed in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Here, we drew on social-psychological theories of intergroup relations to hypothesize that role model interventions might also unintentionally shape students’ beliefs and...

Essentialism is the lay assumption that categories of living things have underlying, unobservable “essences.” When applied to sex and gender, this assumption has a range of negative consequences, including stereotyping and discrimination. Here, we investigate a potentially powerful—but so far unexamined—sociocultural influence on the development of...

In principle, the fundamental concepts PERSON, WOMAN, and MAN should apply equally to people of different genders and races/ethnicities. In reality, these concepts might prioritize certain groups over others. Based on interdisciplinary theories of androcentrism, we hypothesized that (a) PERSON is more associated with men than women (PERSON=MAN) and...

Two studies examined how preschoolers (N = 610; French) explain differences in achievement. Replicating and extending previous research, the results revealed that children invoke more inherent factors (e.g., intelligence) than extrinsic factors (e.g., access to educational resources) when explaining why some children do better in school than others...

In principle, the fundamental concepts PERSON, WOMAN, and MAN should apply equally to people of different genders and races/ethnicities. In reality, these concepts might prioritize certain groups over others. Based on interdisciplinary theories of androcentrism, we hypothesized that (a) PERSON is more associated with men than women (PERSON=MAN) and...

Women and people of colour are underrepresented in physics in many parts of the world, to the detriment of the field. How do academics’ beliefs about the role of ‘brilliance’ in career success contribute to these representation gaps, and what can be done to address them?

Investigating how children think about leadership may inform theories of the gender gaps in leadership among adults. In three studies (N = 492 U.S. children ages 5–10 years), we investigated (1) whether children expect those who claim leadership roles within a peer group to elicit social support and cooperation from the group, (2) children’s own in...

Successful women role models can be—but are not always—effective in increasing pursuit of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers among girls. What makes a woman role model motivating for young girls? An experimental study (N = 205 girls; 5–8 years old; 42.0% girls of color) investigated the effects of a role model’s messag...

Why do socioeconomic disparities in achievement emerge so early in life? Previous answers to this question have generally focused on the perceived deficits of parents from disadvantaged backgrounds (e.g., insufficient childrearing knowledge). Here, we instead focus on the structure of early childhood education and argue that early schooling context...

This monograph uses the Mindset × Context perspective to examine how students’ expectations for success in math (“mindset”) and school- and classroom-based opportunities (“context”) interact to explain inequalities in the critical first year of high school. Data come from the National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM), a nationally representative s...

Expressing intellectual humility-admitting confusion, ignorance, and mistakes-can facilitate learning. We hypothesized that contexts that emphasize the importance of intellectual ability for success discourage the expression of intellectual humility. In Studies 1a and 1b, high school students (combined N = 1,449) reported the most difficulty expres...

Across languages, pronouns encode a range of social information, such as the speaker’s age relative to the addressee (e.g., the Hindi pronoun aap) or the referent’s gender (e.g., the English pronoun he). The assumptions underlying certain pronouns are uncontroversial (e.g., people are different ages). Other pronouns, however, pertain to aspects of...

When teachers believe that students' abilities are fixed, their students' motivation, well-being, and performance tend to suffer. While many interventions have been developed to reduce these so-called fixed mindsets in students and increase the belief that abilities are malleable (i.e., a growth mindset), there are no cost-effective, scalable inter...

Mixed-effects models are an analytic technique for modeling repeated measurement or nested data. This paper explains the logic of mixed-effects modeling and describes two examples of mixed-effects analyses using R (R Development Core Team, 2020). The intended audience of the paper is psychologists who specialize in cognitive development research. T...

In certain domains, people represent some of an individual’s properties (e.g., a tiger’s ferocity), but not others (e.g., a tiger’s being in the zoo), as stemming from the assumed “essence” of the individual’s category. How do children identify which properties of an individual are essentialized and which are not? Here, we examine whether formal ex...

Research in political psychology largely ignores early childhood. This is likely due to the assumption that young children lack the cognitive capacity and social understanding needed for political thought. Challenging this assumption, we argue that research with young children is both possible and important for political psychologists. We focus on...

A new parent-report measure was used to examine parents’ person and process responses to children’s math performance. Twice over a year from 2017-2020, American parents (N = 546; 80% mothers, 20% other caregivers; 62% white, 21% Black, 17% other) reported their responses and math beliefs; their children’s (Mage = 7.48 years; 50% girls, 50% boys) ma...

Past research has explored children’s gender stereotypes about specific intellectual domains, such as mathematics and science, but less is known about the acquisition of domain-general stereotypes about the intellectual abilities of women and men. Here, the authors administered Implicit Association Tests to Chinese Singaporean adults and 8- to 12-y...

Beliefs about the malleability of intellectual ability—mindsets—shape achievement. Recent evidence suggests that even young children hold such mindsets; yet, no reliable and valid instruments exist for measuring individual differences in young children’s mindsets. Here, we developed an instrument for this purpose—the Growth Mindset Scale for Childr...

Understanding how children think of leadership may provide important insights on the roots of adult gender gaps in leadership ambition. In three studies, we evaluated children’s anticipation of social support for leaders as well as their own motivation to pursue leadership roles, paying close attention to the way that gender may influence children’...

Recent advances have made it possible to precisely measure the extent to which any two words are used in similar contexts. In turn, this measure of similarity in linguistic context also captures the extent to which the concepts being denoted are similar. When extracted from massive corpora of text written by millions of individuals, this measure of...

A growth-mindset intervention teaches the belief that intellectual abilities can be developed. Where does the intervention work best? Prior research examined school-level moderators using data from the National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM), which delivered a short growth-mindset intervention during the first year of high school. In the present...

Is exposing students to role models an effective tool for diversifying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)? So far, the evidence for this claim is mixed. Here, we set out to identify systematic sources of variability in STEM role models' effects on student motivation: If we determine which role models are effective for which st...

Language can be used to express broad, unquantified generalizations about both categories (e.g., “Dogs bark”) and individuals (e.g., “Daisy barks”). Although these two classes of statements are commonly assumed to arise from the same linguistic phenomenon—genericity—the literature to date has not offered a direct experimental comparison of the cond...

References included in the systematic review

School underachievement is a persistent problem in the United States. Direct-to-student, computer-delivered growth mindset interventions have shown promise as a way to improve achievement for those at risk of failing in school; however, these interventions only benefit students who happen to be in classrooms that support growth mindset beliefs. Her...

Feeling like an impostor is common among successful individuals, but particularly among women and early-career professionals. Here, we investigated how gender and career-stage differences in impostor feelings vary as a function of the contexts that academics have to navigate. In particular, we focused on a powerful but underexplored contextual feat...

Women are underrepresented in fields where success is believed to require brilliance, but the reasons for this pattern are poorly understood. We investigate perceptions of a “masculinity contest culture,” an organizational environment of ruthless competition, as a key mechanism whereby a perceived emphasis on brilliance discourages female participa...

People commonly think of the mind and the brain as distinct entities that interact, a view known as dualism. At the same time, the public widely acknowledges that science attributes all mental phenomena to the workings of a material brain, a view at odds with dualism. How do people reconcile these conflicting perspectives? We propose that people di...

Globally, women are underrepresented in politics. We propose developmental psychology offers an important, yet underused, theoretical lens for understanding and counteracting the gender gap in political leadership. In making this proposal, we harness insight from research on women’s underrepresentation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathem...

Gender inequities in politics persist around the world. Research in political science and social psychology underscores how gender gaps in politics are fueled by societal messages that politics is a masculine domain. Developmental psychology offers a complementary, yet underappreciated, perspective on how gender inequities in politics are created a...

Close your eyes and think of a young person in your life who has a lot of intellectual potential but hasn't lived up to it because of a lackluster work ethic. Now, think of another young person who maybe isn't as gifted but has accomplished a lot because of sheer determination. Got them picked out? If I were to guess, I'd say you probably came up w...

Classroom settings bring to light many differences between children—differences that children notice and attempt to explain. Here, we advance theory on the psychological processes underlying how children explain the differences they observe in the classroom. Integrating evidence from cognitive, social, cultural, developmental, and educational psych...

According to ambivalent sexism theory, prejudice toward women has two forms: hostile (i.e., antipathy toward women) and benevolent (i.e., patronizing and paternalistic attitudes toward women). We investigated whether 5- to 11-year-old children’s gender attitudes exhibit this bipartite, ambivalent structure. Consistent with this possibility, latent...

Academic fields exhibit substantial levels of gender segregation. To date, most attempts to explain this persistent global phenomenon have relied on limited cross-sections of data from specific countries, fields, or career stages. Here we used a global longitudinal dataset assembled from profiles on ORCID.org to investigate which characteristics of...

Understanding the development and structure of people’s concepts of national groups can contribute to an understanding of their behavior in the political arena, including perhaps the recent rise in nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Here, we provide a developmental investigation of concepts of national groups in a sample of 5- to 8-year-old...

A decrease in student motivation in the middle grades mathematics classroom is cause for concern, especially when trying to make the mathematics environment more inclusive for typically marginalized students. One way to increase student motivation and make classrooms more inclusive is by introducing students to role models - someone who is not only...

Women are underrepresented in careers where success is perceived to depend on high levels of intellectual ability (e.g., brilliance, genius), including those in science and technology. This phenomenon may be due in part to a gender-brilliance stereotype that portrays men as more brilliant than women. Here, we offer the first investigation of whethe...

Classroom settings bring to light many differences between children—differences that children notice and attempt to explain. Here, we advance theory on the psychological processes underlying how children explain the differences they observe in the classroom. Integrating evidence from cognitive, social, cultural, developmental, and educational psych...

To what extent are research results influenced by subjective decisions that scientists make as they design studies? Fifteen research teams independently designed studies to answer five original research questions related to moral judgments, negotiations, and implicit cognition. Participants from 2 separate large samples (total N > 15,000) were then...

To what extent are research results influenced by subjective decisions that scientists make as they design studies? Fifteen research teams independently designed studies to answer five original research questions related to moral judgments, negotiations, and implicit cognition. Participants from two separate large samples (total N > 15,000) were th...

The common stereotype that brilliance is a male trait is an obstacle to women’s success in many prestigious careers. This gender-brilliance stereotype is powerful in part because it seems to be acquired early in life and might thus shape girls’ career aspirations. To date, however, research on this stereotype has not considered how its acquisition...

Evaluative feedback (praise and criticism) has a powerful influence on behavior, in part because it communicates what society values in and expects of an individual. Importantly, feedback often reflects values and expectations that are informed by the social group of the individual receiving feedback, and the stereotypes attached to it, rather than...

How do children reason about academic performance across development? A classic view suggests children’s intuitive theories in this domain undergo qualitative changes. According to this view, older children and adults consider both effort and skill as sources of performance (i.e., a “performance = effort + skill” theory), but younger children can o...

Why do many people come to believe that they and others have a true self? We hypothesized that this belief emerges because people routinely rely on essentialist reasoning to understand personal identity and the self. Across eight studies, we found that (1) the features that participants attributed to the true self resembled the features typically a...

Many students find math difficult, but those who are intrinsically motivated learn and do well even when they face obstacles. Here, we examine an environmental factor that might affect students' intrinsic motivation in math: namely, teachers' beliefs about success in math. Do teachers perceive elementary school math as a domain that requires an inn...

What aspects of a person determine whether they are the same person they were in the past? This is one of the fundamental questions of research on personal identity. To date, this literature has focused on identifying the psychological states (e.g., moral beliefs, memories) that people rely on when making identity judgments. But the notion of perso...

Understanding how people explain is a core task for cognitive science. In this Opinion article, we argue that research on explanation would benefit from more engagement with how the cognitive systems involved in generating explanations (e.g., attention, long-term memory) shape the outputs of this process. Although it is clear that these systems do...

Concepts of national groups (e.g., Americans, Canadians) are an important source of identity and meaning in people’s lives. Here, we provide a developmental investigation of these concepts. Across three studies involving 5- to 8-year-olds and adults in the United States, we found that (1) compared to older children and adults, young children were m...

Despite the numerous intellectual contributions made by women, we find evidence of bias against them in contexts that emphasize intellectual ability. In the first experiment, 347 participants were asked to refer individuals for a job. Approximately half of the participants were led to believe that the job required high-level intellectual ability; t...