Pearl Han Li - Social and Moral Learning Lab

Welcome to the Social and Moral Learning Lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison! We are a developmental psychology lab run by Dr. Pearl Han Li. Our lab studies children's social learning and moral cognition from developmental and cultural perspectives.

Join our team!

Undergraduate Research Assistant Opportunities

The Social and Moral Learning Lab welcomes motivated UW-Madison undergraduates to join our team starting Spring 2025! As a member of our lab, you'll gain hands-on experience in various aspects of the research process, including recruiting and communicating with families, conducting studies both in-person and online, creating study materials, coding video data, performing literature reviews, and disseminating research findings.

We are looking for individuals who are genuinely interested in child development and those who are committed to learning and contributing to our collaborative environment. If you are interested in applying or learning more, please fill out this application form. We encourage applications from students of all backgrounds to contribute to the inclusive research environment of our lab.

Current Research Projects

Children's Understanding of Belief Change

Changing one’s beliefs can be challenging, particularly when the beliefs are deeply rooted. Do children value others who are open to revising their beliefs? Our work examines how initial belief strength, types of counter-evidence, and levels of social pressure to retain existing beliefs affect children's reasoning about belief change. Some of our research questions include: Do children recognize that strongly-held beliefs are harder to change than weakly-held beliefs? Do children judge someone as epistemically and morally virtuous if they change their moral beliefs after learning about some ethical concerns, although everybody they know think and act differently?

Do Children Value Intellectual Humility?

Young children are enthusiastic explorers of the physical and social world, and fostering an intellectually humble mindset can be beneficial. Do children recognize and place value on displays of humility in others prior to the age that they can fully express and reflect on their own intellectual humility? We investigate this by exploring whether young children favorably evaluate and choose to learn from interlocutors who display key elements of intellectual humility. For example, do children prefer to learn from individuals who admit their uncertainty rather than those who appear overly confident? Do children make distinctions between displays of humility in scientific versus moral contexts?

Responsibility in Sharing and Receiving Information

The act of learning from others is social by nature. Testimonial exchanges—where one person shares information and another learns from it—can involve a cooperative commitment. When people engage in communication of certain forms, the speaker and the listener each take on specific rights and responsibilities. In this project, we explore how children and adults think about blame and responsibility in communication. For example, do they believe that listeners have the right to hold speakers accountable by holding the speaker accountable if the information turns out to be incorrect? Do children feel responsible for unintentionally spreading misinformation?