Research Assistant in the Social Origins Lab (Cooperation and Social Reasoning in Children)
Jan Engelmann, Professor
Psychology
Open. Apprentices needed for the fall semester. Enter your application online beginning August 21st. The deadline to apply is Monday, August 31st, 4pm.
In order to eligible for the position you MUST COMPLETE THIS GOOGLE FORM and URAP application:
https://forms.gle/9iweDwC2JrRNP82a8
We address questions about the evolution and development of socio-cognitive skills by comparing humans to other animals (mostly chimpanzees, our closest living relatives) and by studying how children develop.
How do children reason? How strongly is reasoning embedded in social, cognitive processes? The goal of this project is to investigate how children’s tendencies for reasoning and cooperation inform one another. We aim to understand how the interplay of these processes develops and how these behaviors differ from non-human primates. The subset of ongoing developmental studies involved in this project focus on children's reasoning, beliefs, and interactions with others.
Research assistants will be hired to work on one of these studies and may additionally help with the comparative research. Please visit our website for recent publications and more information on our work.
Specific ongoing studies:
1. Social Rationality and Parental Uncertainty: how do peer's decisions affect our own? Do kids follow what their partners do? Social rationality is a comparative study of 3-year-olds' and chimpanzees' abilities to revise beliefs based on social information. Parental uncertainty is a cross-cultural study on how parents communicate uncertainty in the US and China. RA's must commit to weekly weekend testing.
2. Explanation Flexibility: Are young children really that bad at innovating new solutions? This project (in the development phase) will look at how we can promote children's innovative thinking (i.e. through explanation, analogy, etc.).
3. Evolution of Rationality: How do children rationalize decision-making? This study investigates how children make decisions between multiple choices. This study works with 3 year old with a finding games involved.
4. Causal Learning: This project explores the different ways young children (2.5- to 4-year-olds) learn about cause-and-effect relationships. As an RA, you would run the experiment with children, manage and organize data, and code in excel.
5. Cognitive Collaboration: How do children think together to solve cognitive tasks? Across three sample contexts (rural Kenya, urban China, and urban USA), we examine how pairs of children (4-5yos & 7-8yos) collaborate on a memory task, and how their approach to collaboration varies across cultural context.
6. Epistemic Injustice Vignettes: When is it wrong to disbelieve someone? In this project, we investigate when children (6-7yos) think that it is wrong to discount one informant in favor of another, and what they think the consequences are for the discounted informant.
7. Intellectual Humility: Intellectual humility, or one’s metacognitive awareness of the limits of their own knowledge, is a critical trait for citizens in functional societies. In this project, we will test 6- to 10-year-old children to ask whether intellectual humility shapes children’s learning by affecting their willingness to engage in costly information search. We will compare our results with data from children in Kenya to explore how intellectual humility affects children across diverse cultural contexts.
8. ...and more! There are also other developing projects that you may work on.
TO APPLY, PLEASE FILL OUT THE GOOGLE FORM LINKED AS WELL AS SUBMITTING YOUR URAP APPLICATION.
Role: Research assistants will be involved in data collection, coding video data, participant recruitment, and assisting with administrative tasks. Students should expect to be heavily involved in multiple aspects of the research projects and gain a well-rounded understanding of the research process.
Qualifications: Students must be reliable, dedicated, and have strong communication skills.
Students are expected to be able to work independently to meet project deadlines.
Must have a desire to work with children and be comfortable interacting with children (previous experience with children a plus)
Must be able to travel to research sites (schools, parks, museums).
Weekend availability is required for specific studies.
Work study is available to applicable applicants through the RASE program.
Required time commitment is approximately 9hrs/wk for at least two semesters.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Maria Isabel Francis, Staff Researcher
Hours: 9-11 hrs
Off-Campus Research Site: Off-Campus Research Site: This project will take place both on and off campus. The Social Origins Lab is based in Berkeley Way West, but data collection will take place at local schools and museums. Ability to drive is preferred.
Related website: https://socialoriginslab.com
Related website: https://forms.gle/9iweDwC2JrRNP82a8