Madeline Derentz
Psychology Major
Sharing is Caring: Do Children Follow the Golden Rule?
Child development research continues to grow every day. After working in a social development lab at Boston University, I understood how developmental research impacts this expanding field within psychology. Over the summer, I helped tackle important research questions pertaining to moral norms and children’s prosocial behaviors such as reciprocity, fairness, and sharing. Are children able to share with those who are different from themselves? Do children understand that reciprocity is a social norm? At what age do children start to reciprocate in their social lives? These are the kinds of questions that my lab wanted to explore. While having hands-on experience with psychological research for the first time, I found that lab work was different from what I expected. In my presentation, I will explain how my daily duties, such as coding, recruiting, and conducting experiments, helped me understand a world of psychology that was unfamiliar.
