Friendship and Social Relationships

We examine how infants and children make sense of social relationships, especially friendship. We ask how children use cues such as similarity, loyalty, and shared experiences to infer who is friends with whom and to predict how friends will treat one another. We are especially interested in how relationships shape the social dynamics of sharing information: what it means to share or betray a secret, and how alliances color gossip. A related question is how people integrate multiple, and sometimes competing, pieces of social information to judge what kind of relationship two people have—work we are pursuing in part through cognitive modeling. Across these projects, we explore how concepts of friendship develop, what children expect friends to do, and how relationships shape judgments about trust, reputation, and moral behavior.