This article introduces an accessible approach to implementing unmoderated remote research in developmental science-research in which children and families participate in studies remotely and independently, without directly interacting with researchers. Unmoderated remote research has the potential to strengthen developmental science by: (1) facilitating the implementation of studies that are easily replicable, (2) allowing for new approaches to longitudinal studies and studies of parent-child interaction, and (3) including families from more diverse backgrounds and children growing up in more diverse environments in research. We describe an approach we have used to design and implement unmoderated remote research that is accessible to researchers with limited programming expertise, and we describe the resources we have made available on a new website (discoveriesonline.org) to help researchers get started with implementing this approach. We discuss the potential of this method for developmental science and highlight some challenges still to be overcome to harness the power of unmoderated remote research for advancing the field. The field of cognitive development was founded upon remarkable insights gleaned from everyday interactions with children. Piaget's theory of cognitive development (1954) began with his observations of his own children playing on their mats, dropping things from their highchairs, and playing with marbles. Carey (1985) revolutionized our understanding of how concepts originate and change by analyzing conversations with her own child about birth, the nature of life, and death. The field is full of stories of great theoretical insights made by researchers closely watching children as they crawl around near the sides of high beds (Adolph, Kretch, & LoBue, 2014), negotiate the rules of games among themselves on a playground (Borman, 1981), and try to sit down on way-too-tiny toy tractors (DeLoache, 1987). Of course, the field has never relied on the observations of individual researchers alone. We use these observations to design experiments that recreate the situations in which the behaviors were first observed, which can then be replicated by labs around the world. But still, individual interactions between researchers and their participants have always been central to the field of cognitive development. The notion that we can learn from watching and interacting with children, along with the intriguing challenges of thinking about how to recreate the conditions of everyday life in CONTACT Marjorie Rhodes

This article introduces an accessible approach to implementing unmoderated remote research in developmental science—research in which children and families participate in studies remotely and on their own, without directly interacting with researchers. Unmoderated remote research has the potential to strengthen developmental science by: (1) facilitating the implementation of studies that are easily replicable, (2) allowing for new approaches to longitudinal studies and studies of parent-child interaction, and (3) including families from more diverse backgrounds and children growing up in more diverse environments in research. We describe an approach we have used to design and implement unmoderated remote research that is accessible to researchers with limited programming expertise, and describe resources available on a new website to help researchers get started with this approach, http://discoveriesonline.org. We discuss the potential of this method for developmental science and highlight some challenges still to be overcome to harness the power of unmoderated remote research for advancing the field.

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Young children often prefer people who are high in status and have access to resources. Children also favor fairness and equality, especially when it comes to sharing resources. Two studies examined how children (N = 185; 4.0 – 6.9 years, Mage = 5.49; 42% White; 10% Asian; 12% Black or African-American; 13% Hispanic; 29% other or undisclosed) reconcile these conflicting preferences by investigating the relation between children’s social preferences and their resource allocation to White and Black children. Race provides an important case to examine how children resolve this conflict, as children show preferences for stereotypically high status (White) people, but also awareness of systemic racial inequality that disadvantages Black people. In a costly sharing resource allocation task (i.e., a Dictator Game) where participants were asked how much of a limited resource they wanted to share with a Black and with a White child, Study 1 revealed that participants sometimes chose to share more with a White, compared to a Black, child, but that biased giving was unrelated to children’s biased feelings of warmth toward White children. Study 2 confirmed that biased giving was unrelated to children’s feelings of warmth, and instead implicated children’s beliefs about race and wealth: Children who expected White people to have more wealth showed more pro-White bias in their giving behavior. Together, these results suggest that cultural stereotypes about wealth might shape children’s economic decision-making in a way that perpetuates disadvantage, but also indicated that the processes that underlie resource allocation decisions warrant further study.

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