Lin Bian

University of Chicago | UC · Department of Psychology

Women’s underrepresentation in academic fields and professions emphasizing high intellectual talents persists as a prominent societal issue. To explore early antecedents of this gender imbalance, the present study investigated the developmental changes in children’s social preference of boys and girls who pursue brilliance-required (vs. effort-requ...

Wealth‐based disparities in health care wherein the poor receive undertreatment in painful conditions are a prominent issue that requires immediate attention. Research with adults suggests that these disparities are partly rooted in stereotypes associating poor individuals with pain insensitivity. However, whether and how children consider a suffer...

Recent work suggests that the stereotype associating brilliance with men may underpin women's underrepresentation in prestigious careers, yet little is known about its development and consequences in non‐Western contexts. The present research examined the onset of this stereotype and its relation to children's motivation in 5‐ to 7‐year‐old Korean...

Across three pre-registered studies (n = 221 4-9-year olds, 51% female; 218 parents, 80% female; working- and middle-class backgrounds; data collected during 2019-2021) conducted in the United States (Studies 1-2; 74% White) and China (Study 3; 100% Asian), we document the emergence of a preference for "strivers." Beginning at age 7, strivers (who...

Across three pre-registered studies (n = 221 4-9-year-olds, 51% female; 218 parents, 80% female; working- and middle-class backgrounds; data collected during 2019-2021) conducted in the US (Studies 1-2; 74% White) and China (Study 3; 100% Asian), we document the emergence of a preference for “strivers”. Beginning at age 7, strivers (who work really...

Leadership is inextricably embedded in human groups. One central obligation of leaders is to embody the identity of their group by acting in line with group norms. Yet little is known about how leadership and conformity are initially associated in people’s minds, how this association develops in childhood, and how cultural values shape this associa...

Children's ethnicity-status associations are often studied in societies where one ethnic group possesses status across multiple dimensions, such as political influence and wealth. This study examined children's (6-12 years) and adults' representations of more complex hierarchies in Indonesia (N = 341; 38% Native Indonesian, 33% Chinese Indonesian,...

Implicit theories of intelligence, or intelligence mindsets, refer to individuals’ basic beliefs regarding whether intelligence is a fixed trait or a malleable ability. Recently, these mindsets have been analyzed at the organizational level to characterize an environment’s endorsement of these beliefs. Environments embracing a fixed mindset believe...

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 ages 4 to 7 years ( N = 240) played a challenging science activity in one of three conditions. Ch...

Girls and women have matched boys and men in academic achievements. However, the gender disparity in representation favoring men over women persists in many careers and domains. This chapter focuses on the sociocultural factors shaping women’s participation in the STEM domain and beyond. In particular, I highlight two classes of stereotypes that ma...

Beginning in infancy, children expect individuals in a group to care for and be loyal to in-group members. One prominent cue that children use to infer that individuals belong to the same group is similarity. Does any salient similarity among individuals elicit an expectation of in-group preference, or does contextual information modulate these exp...

In the United States, there is a common stereotype associating brilliance with men. This gender brilliance stereotype emerges early and may undermine women’s engagement in many prestigious careers. However, past research on its acquisition has focused almost exclusively on American children’s beliefs of White people’s intellectual talents. Therefor...

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...

Paltering is a form of deception whereby true statements are used to mislead and is widely employed in negotiations, marketing, espionage, and ordinary communications where speakers hold ulterior motives. We argue that paltering is accomplished through strategic violations of communicative norms such as the Gricean cooperative principles of relevan...

Despite the numerous positive benefits of consuming nutritious food, American breakfasts are notoriously unhealthy. Recent research with U.S. adults found that the resistance to include nutritious foods at breakfast is due in part to misconceptions about what “breakfast” should be. Here, we assessed the development of these misconceptions in 4- and...

Healthy breakfast consumption has a multitude of positive benefits. However, typical American breakfasts are notoriously unhealthy. We hypothesize that the resistance to include nutritious foods at breakfast is due in part to misconceptions about what "breakfast" should be. Consistent with this proposal, results from three studies (N = 1097) sugges...

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...

Significance Recent research suggests that infants possess principles of fairness and ingroup support. We examined whether 1.5- and 2.5-y-olds would prioritize fairness or ingroup support when the two were pitted against each other. Children watched mixed-recipients resource-allocation events in which a puppet distributor faced two potential recipi...

Pervasive cultural stereotypes associate brilliance with men, not women. Given these stereotypes, messages suggesting that a career requires brilliance may undermine women’s interest. Consistent with this hypothesis, linking success to brilliance lowered women’s (but not men’s) interest in a range of educational and professional opportunities intro...

In his 2012 book, Jussim suggests that people's beliefs about various groups (i.e., their stereotypes) are largely accurate. We unpack this claim using the distinction between generic and statistical beliefs – a distinction supported by extensive evidence in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and philosophy. Regardless of whether one understands st...

Emergent attitudes toward brilliance The distribution of women and men across academic disciplines seems to be affected by perceptions of intellectual brilliance. Bian et al. studied young children to assess when those differential perceptions emerge. At age 5, children seemed not to differentiate between boys and girls in expectations of “really,...

Adults routinely make sense of others' actions by inferring the mental states that underlie these actions. Over the past two decades, developmental researchers have made significant advances in understanding the origins of this ability in infancy. This evidence indicates that when infants observe an agent act in a simple scene, they infer the agent...

The fifth edition of a work that defines the field of cognitive neuroscience, with entirely new material that reflects recent advances in the field. Each edition of this classic reference has proved to be a benchmark in the developing field of cognitive neuroscience. The fifth edition of The Cognitive Neurosciences continues to chart new directions...