Children’s Effort Exertion and Reasoning Reflect Strategic Sensitivity to Gendered Costs and Benefits

Our time and energy are limited: from early in life, we must strategically decide whether and how to exert effort. Children are sensitive to instrumental costs and benefits, expending effort in ways that maximize utility and expecting others to do the same. However, our actions are also embedded within sociocultural contexts, where the value of effort is shaped by not only its ability to achieve our goals but also by how it is perceived by others. Thus, individual differences exist in the social costs and benefits that actions carry as a function of social expectations. In this dissertation, I focus on how gendered expectations shape the ways children exert effort and reason about the effort of others. In Chapter 2, I explore how expectations for obedience (versus independence) influence the effortful strategies children adopt when their firsthand experiences conflict with those of a teacher. Using caregiver-reported gender, I found that girls persisted longer on average in taught solutions (a strategy prioritizing obedience), while boys spent a greater average time exploring their own ideas (a strategy prioritizing independence), aligning with gendered expectations. In Chapter 3, I examine how gendered expectations shape reasoning about others’ effort, revealing that adults and children expect girls to exert emotional and cognitive effort to help others (aligning with expectations of other-orientedness), while expecting boys to exert physical effort (aligning with expectations of agency). Adults also reinforce these patterns through differential requests and undervalue the effort they request from girls, but children only begin to request effort across gendered lines with increasing age, and their tendency to do so relates to their caregivers’ gendered requests. Throughout the present experiments, I vary the gender typicality of the contexts that effort is investigated in, highlighting that social costs and benefits shape behaviour across contexts. Together, these findings expand utility-based accounts of effort by showing that social expectations, especially those shaped by gender, guide both effortful behavior and reasoning, and provide initial evidence to suggest that socialization shapes children’s engagement with effort and contributes to the reproduction of inequities from early in development.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.