Andrei Cimpian
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andreicimpian.bsky.social
Andrei Cimpian
@andreicimpian.bsky.social
310 followers 140 following 46 posts
Professor, Department of Psychology, New York University
Research: gender, stereotypes, motivation, explanation
President, @cogdevsoc.bsky.social
Married to @joecimpian.bsky.social
Website: https://cimpianlab.com
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andreicimpian.bsky.social
Scientific explanation is one of the most sophisticated forms of human reasoning. Nevertheless, here we hypothesize that scientific explanation is susceptible to some of the same biases that influence everyday thinking—particularly during the initial stages of theory building, when scientists are first grappling with complex phenomena and are thus more likely to rely on explanatory “guesses.” Specifically, we investigated whether scientific explanation exhibits an inherence bias—a tendency to explain phenomena through inherent or intrinsic features rather than extrinsic factors such as context or relations. Consistent with this hypothesis, a comprehensive analysis of major explanatory transitions across the history of Western science revealed that initial scientific explanations systematically favored inherent properties, while subsequent explanations incorporated extrinsic factors more consistently. Seven experiments with lay participants (both adults and children; N 1,673) and two experiments with practicing scientists from top departments worldwide (N 275) provided converging evidence for this bias and identified the psychological mechanisms involved. When explaining unfamiliar phenomena, even leading scientists showed a robust tendency to overweight inherent properties and underweight extrinsic factors relative to established scientific understanding. This bias appears rooted in basic cognitive constraints on attention and memory that excessively narrow the space of hypotheses initially considered.
September 22, 2025 at 2:27 PM
andreicimpian.bsky.social
💖This paper has been ~11 years in the making - and probably my favorite project of all time. Thrilled to see it in @pnas.org! I'm so lucky that Zach decided to do a second PhD and join my lab @psychillinois.bsky.social back in 2014 - a fabulous scientist & human being! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Historical and experimental evidence that inherent properties are overweighted in early scientific explanation
September 22, 2025 at 2:27 PM
andreicimpian.bsky.social
Self-Efficacy, Interest, and Anxiety as a Function of Gender Stereotypes about Required Effort
May 8, 2025 at 12:17 PM
andreicimpian.bsky.social
Younger Children Believe Their Own Gender Has to Work Less Hard than the Gender Outgroup to be Good in Math and Reading
May 8, 2025 at 12:17 PM
andreicimpian.bsky.social
Our culture attributes women’s and girls’ ability in mathematics and related domains to their efforts more so than men’s and boys’—a stereotype that contributes to inequities in scientific and technical careers. Here, we provide the first investigation of this gender stereotype in children, examining its endorsement across a broad age range and assessing its links to student motivation. Specifically, we investigated 6- to 12-year-old U.S. elementary school students’ stereotypes about how hard girls and boys have to work to be good at math and, as a comparison, reading (N = 246; 50% girls; 50% White, 19% Asian, 9% Multiracial, 6% Black). We also tested whether these stereotypes are related to children’s self-efficacy, interest, and anxiety in math and reading, and whether these links differ in strength across age. Although we anticipated that, like U.S. adults, children would stereotype girls as having to work harder than boys to be good at math, we found that—in line with previously documented gender ingroup biases—younger children reported that effort was less of a requirement for their own (vs. another) gender; this ingroup bias was absent among older children. However, consistent with our hypotheses, children who more strongly believed their own gender needed to work harder to be good in a subject also reported lower self-efficacy in that subject, and older children reported lower interest in it as well. The present research contributes to our understanding of how to effectively encourage student motivation in school.
May 8, 2025 at 12:17 PM
andreicimpian.bsky.social
📣 The Cognitive Development Society (CDS) is now on Bluesky! Please follow them @cogdevsoc.bsky.social for news about the 2026 conference in Montreal and more!

cogdevsoc.org
Cognitive Development Society logo
January 27, 2025 at 7:35 PM
andreicimpian.bsky.social
The results in one image! ♥️
January 21, 2025 at 5:01 PM
andreicimpian.bsky.social
❓What are young children's beliefs about ability like? The fabulous Melis Muradoglu led us to an enlightening new answer 👇

Journal: doi.org/10.1037/dev0...
Free pdf: drive.google.com/file/d/1egk9...
Adults hold a broad range of beliefs about intellectual ability. Key examples include beliefs about its malleability, its distribution in the population, whether high levels of it (“brilliance”) are necessary for success, its origins, and its responsiveness to intervention. Here, we examined the structure and motivational significance of this network of consequential beliefs in a sample of elementary school-age children (5- to 11-year-olds, N = 231; 116 girls, 112 boys, three gender nonbinary children; predominantly White and Asian children from relatively high-income backgrounds). We assessed five beliefs: (a) growth mindsets (malleability), (b) universal mindsets (distribution), (c) brilliance beliefs (necessity for success), and beliefs about ability’s (d) innateness and (e) responsiveness to intervention. Even among the youngest children, these beliefs were empirically distinguishable and also largely coherent, in that they related to each other in expected ways. Moreover, the five beliefs assessed here were differentially related to children’s learning (vs. performance) goals, preference for challenging tasks, and evaluative concern (i.e., concern that mistakes will lead others to evaluate the self negatively). Even when adjusting for age, children with growth mindsets were oriented toward learning goals and preferred challenging tasks; children who believed ability has innate origins preferred performance goals; and younger (but not older) children who thought success required brilliance expressed more concern over being evaluated. These findings speak to the multifaceted nature of children’s concepts of ability and highlight their significance for children’s achievement-related attitudes and behavior in the early school years.
January 21, 2025 at 5:01 PM
andreicimpian.bsky.social
Given the totality of the evidence, the original claim ("By the age of six, both boys and girls believe that boys are more likely to be “really, really smart”") is correct, at least on a collective interpretation of "boys and girls"
December 13, 2024 at 9:25 PM
andreicimpian.bsky.social
Hi! This is correct numbers-wise, although it's not entirely clear to me what 50-50 performance means in this task (given the strong ingroup bias at this age). Also: girls are less egalitarian (toward White targets, as in Bian et al., 2017) in our NYC replication. drive.google.com/file/d/1rT0M...
December 13, 2024 at 9:23 PM
andreicimpian.bsky.social
Abstract:
December 10, 2024 at 12:42 PM
andreicimpian.bsky.social
New paper in Cognitive Psychology with first author Vivian Liu! We investigate U.S. children's and adults' perceptions of discrimination. authors.elsevier.com/c/1kEp32Hxod...
December 10, 2024 at 12:42 PM