Welcome to the Social Cognitive Development Lab at Yale University!

We are part of the Yale Developmental Labs.

We study how young minds master the dizzying complexity of the social world.

Latest SCDL Publications

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Publications

Children infer social group attitudes from evaluative behavioral information but do not extend them to unfamiliar group members

Nora Feline Becker, Yarrow Dunham, & Juliane Degner (2026). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

Logical Operations Shape the Formation of Implicit Attitudes: Evidence From the Negation of Bipolar and Unipolar Adjectives

Benedek Kurdi, Zephyr Weinreich, Yarrow Dunham, & Eric Mandelbaum (2025). Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science.

People can infer the magnitude of other people’s knowledge even when they cannot infer its contents

Rosie Aboody, Isaac Davis, Yarrow Dunham, & Julian Jara-Ettinger. (2024). Cognition.

Actions, Actors, and Affiliations: Divergent moral and intergroupinfluences on different forms of social judgment

Youjung Choi & Yarrow Dunham. (2026). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

A Children’s Case for Reparations:U.S. Children’s and Adults’ Ideas About Collective Responsibility

Pinar Aldan & Yarrow Dunham (2025). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.