Over the last ten years, Oosterhof and Todorov's valence-dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgments of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof and Todorov's methodology across 11 world regions, 41 countries, and 11,570 participants. When we used Oosterhof and Todorov's original analysis strategy, the valence-dominance model generalized across regions. When we used an alternative methodology to allow for correlated dimensions we observed much less generalization. Collectively, these results suggest that, while the valence-dominance model generalizes very well across regions when dimensions are forced to be orthogonal, regional differences are revealed when we use different extraction methods, correlate and rotate the dimension reduction solution.

The present studies (total n = 151) experimentally manipulated meaningfulness in novel social groups and measured any resulting ingroup biases. Study 1 showed that even when groups were arbitrary and presumptively meaningless, 5-to 8-year-olds developed equally strong ingroup biases as did children in more meaningful groups. Study 2 explored the lengths required to effectively reduce ingroup biases by stressing the arbitrariness of the grouping dimension. Even in this case ingroup bias persisted in resource allocation behavior, though it was attenuated on preference and similarity measures. These results suggested that one has to go to great lengths to counteract children's tendency to imbue newly encountered social groups with rich affiliative meaning.

The data presented in this article have not been published and are not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

White for help with data collection, and Ilayda Orhan and Haley Hegefeld for coding. Data Availability Statement:All study materials, data files, and analysis code that replicates all results in the manuscript and supplemental materials are also openly shared and are available on an anonymous link at: https://osf.io/6kx4e/?view_only=33413fde2df346328f32e0bc5e72d11e. LIMITS OF STRUCTURAL THINKING 2 Research Highlights• Two studies probed children's structural reasoning about gender norms and explored evaluative and behavioral implications of this reasoning process with both novel and familiar gendered behaviors.• Children as young as 4 attend to structural cues to explain gendered behaviors and adjust their judgments about mutability and acceptability of those behaviors accordingly.• However, they still have internalist tendencies in explaining familiar gendered behaviors and show group-based discrimination.

We examine the emergence and development of more complex and differentiated understandings of wealth, poverty, and social inequality.• American middle-class children gradually grow less positive towards the wealthy relative to the poor during early and middle childhood.• Older children increasingly recognize that the wealthy have disproportionate social power to affect a broad range of outcomes.• These early conceptualizations may set the stage for adult reasoning, including adult decisions about how society should address issues related to inequality and poverty.