Principal Researcher : Dr. Kristen DunfieldMy research focuses on how children interact with, learn from, and evaluate the people in their environment. Specifically, I examine the effect of social cognition on the development, production, and maintenance of trust and prosocial behaviour. The long-term goal of my research program is to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the effect of trust on human behaviour and development through the utilization of methods and theory from social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology.
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Lab
Work in the lab can broadly be divided into three related concepts examining:
- How children extend trust to others through the production of prosocial behaviours
- The development of children's ability to respond to other's displays of trustworthiness through selective social interactions
- Individual difference factors that affect the tendency to extend trust
Ongoing Lab Projects
- The development of prosocial behavior in naturalistic settings – A cross-cultural comparison of an urban Canadian and rural Mexican context.
- Motives and selective learning.
- Helpers and halos: Examining social evaluation in the domain of prosocial behaviour.
- Development of the Childhood Prosocial Assessment.
- The effects of bilingualism on toddlers’ evaluations of social and moral conventions.
- Effects of trait level security and priming on prosocial behaviour.