Xin (Alice) Zhao
Xin (Alice) Zhao
Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Psychology, ECNU
Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Psychology, ECNU
Welcome!
Hi! I am an Assistant Professor (晨晖学者）in Department of Educational Psychology at East China Normal University (华东师范大学), Shanghai, China. I study children's social cognitive development. Specifically, my research program centers around children's developing understanding of choice and constraints across cultures, as well as its implications on children's behavioral regulation and social evaluations.
My research
To successfully navigate the world, human beings must identify the choices they can make as well as the constraints on their choices. These perceptions and beliefs about choice can be influenced by multiple factors, some of which originate from the external world (e.g., physical laws, socio-moral norms) and some of which originate from the internal world (e.g., desires, goals, motivations etc). Large individual and cultural variations exist in adults’ perceptions and beliefs about choices. Importantly, these views about choice often guide actions, both the regulation of one’s own actions and the interpretation of others’ actions. My research program investigates how beliefs about choice develop throughout childhood and across cultures, as well as their implications on children’s developmental outcomes — both the regulation of one’s own actions and the evaluations of others’ actions. These studies speak to children’s self-regulation and goal-pursuit, as well as their social evaluations and moral judgment.
Choice and Social Evaluation
Most people value and desire the freedom to choose for oneself. Granting others the freedom to choose for oneself is thus considered more prosocial than limiting others' freedom to choose. In this project, we explore children's development of understanding and appreciation of the action of leaving choices for others.
Choice, Internal Constraints, and Self-regulation
As adults, we have various beliefs about which of our actions are freely chosen and which actions are not. In prior work we have shown that there are systematic developmental changes cultural variations in children’s conception of free will from preschool to middle childhood, particularly as it relates to difficult choices that require self control. These beliefs develop during a time in which there are also increases in children's executing functions. In this project, we explore the links between children's beliefs in free will and their capacity for self control.
Children's reasoning on changes of rules
In the preschool years children become very interested in cultural learning: learning about the norms, rules, and conventions of social behavior. Puzzlingly, sometimes children at this age seem rigid about social norms, and other times they seem more flexible. In this project, we seek to explain these seemingly contradictory findings by examining the conditions under which young children believe rules are subject to change, and how they reason about who has the authority to change them.
Talking about choice and constraints
Our beliefs in choice and free will are highly dependent on our experiences, and show significant individual and cultural variation. In this project, we explore developmental origins and changes in how children talk about stories about moral and social constraints on choice in different cultural contexts (US and China) from preschool though middle childhood. We also explore how parents talk about choice in different domains (e.g. moral, conventional or personal) with their children across different cultures.
The moral virtue of self-control
During early and middle childhood, as children become more competent in self-control, do they also understand the virtue of exercising self-control? For example, do they evaluate someone who overcomes an individual desire in order to help others more favorably than someone who did not have the individual desire? In this study, we investigate these questions.
