About

Professor Zoe Liberman is an Associate Professor in the Psychological & Brain Sciences department at UC Santa Barbara. She is the Principal Investigator of the Liberman Child Studies Lab, where her research focuses on child development and related psychological studies. Her work involves exploring various aspects of child cognition, language development, and social understanding, contributing to the broader understanding of how children learn and grow. Professor Liberman's lab includes researchers, post-docs, graduate students, and undergraduate students, all engaged in research activities that advance knowledge in child studies. She is accessible via contact at +1-805-893-5498 or zoe.liberman@psych.ucsb.edu, and her office is located at 3821 Psychology East.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Law

Selected publications

• Children expect national group membership to guide food choice

  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology · 2025-12-11

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  = 6.90 years) to sort familiar foods, unfamiliar foods, and disgust elicitors based on who they believed ate the item: people from their national ingroup, people from a national outgroup, both, or neither. We also measured children's own food preferences and ingroup bias. Both studies provided evidence that children expected ingroup members to eat familiar foods and expected outgroup members to eat unfamiliar foods. Interestingly, children's cultural expectations about food may also be linked to their own food preferences and bias. Children with stronger personal preferences for familiar foods over unfamiliar foods were more likely to think that only people from their ingroup would eat those foods, and children with more bias against a national outgroup were less likely to expect outgroup members to eat familiar foods. These results demonstrate that children do have a cultural understanding of food choice and that their personal experiences and preferences linked to their social expectations.

  PublisherDOI

• Children Can Consider Social Relationships When Evaluating Liars

  2025-06-17

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Two preregistered experiments investigated whether children (3–12-year-olds; n = 456) and adults (n = 120) from the United States more negatively evaluate child characters who tell “emotionally hurtful lies”—lies explicitly told knowing that it will make another person feel bad—to a friend than to a more distant social partner. When children and adults judged one independent emotionally hurtful lie (Study 1), they evaluated it negatively regardless of whether the liar was lying to a friend, a classmate, or an enemy. However, when comparatively evaluating two people who told the same emotionally hurtful lie (at the same time), participants judged a friend’s lie more negatively than a classmate’s lie (Study 2). Interestingly, relationship impacted evaluations of emotionally hurtful lies to a similar extent as evaluations of failures to help. Taken together, people’s evaluations of emotionally hurtful lies take social relationships into account in comparative but not independent contexts. More broadly, school-aged children and adults appear to understand that close relationships entail certain obligations, and breaking these obligations is more condemnable than engaging in the same antisocial interaction with a more distant social partner.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Comparative Status Hypothesis: Inferences About Discrimination Vary Based on Identity Salience

  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin · 2025-06-30

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Past research examining when people label an outcome as discrimination has largely ignored contextual factors beyond the victim-perpetrator dyad. We contend that the person who benefits from the outcome-referred to here as competitor-also influences how likely someone is to be labeled a victim of discrimination. Specifically, we argue that because people hold multiple social identities, which vary in their perceived status, the identity of a target's competitor can change how likely the same target is to be seen as a victim. In three studies, we show that White U.S. adults were more likely to infer that a target had faced discrimination when the target's competitor highlighted a lower status aspect of the target's identity. This pattern was seen for targets from multiple backgrounds, including Asian men, White women, and Asian women. These results highlight the importance of moving beyond the victim-perpetrator dyad when considering whether an outcome is seen as discrimination.

  PublisherDOI

• Children see private correction as a cue to friendship

  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology · 2025-05-02 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Children use a number of cues to infer friendship. For instance, children believe that people who are similar, spend time together, and are loyal to each other are friends (Liberman & Shaw, 2019). Here, in two studies (total N = 524), we investigated whether 4- to 12-year-old children infer friendship using a novel cue: managing someone's reputation by correcting them in private. Children were asked whether an agent was better friends with a person they corrected in public, or one they corrected in private. Both younger (4- to 7-years-old) and older (8- to 12-years-old) children inferred stronger friendship between the agent and the privately corrected character (Study 1). In a second study, we asked whether an agent was better friends with a person they corrected in private, or a person who shared a different friendship cue (similarity, propinquity, loyalty). With age children became more likely to privilege private correction, and children who were attentive to the task expected private correction to be a stronger friendship cue than similarity (Study 2). These findings suggest that concerns for others' reputations may play an important role in friendships, and protecting another person's reputation may be increasingly indicative of friendship with development.

  PublisherDOI

• Does Children's Developing Understanding of Linguistic Register Impact Their Social Preferences?

  Social Development · 2025-03-28 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT People use different communication patterns based on the context and who they are addressing. These differences, known as linguistic register, are common across human speech and recognized early in development. Here, we examine 4–11‐year‐old American children's ( N = 227) ability to use linguistic registers to determine a speaker's addressee as well as their social preferences for people who use correct registers. Although children's ability to recognize linguistic registers improved with age, even the youngest children tested (Ages 4 and 5) could correctly identify a speaker's addressee and preferred speakers who had spoken “correctly” over those who made register errors. Interestingly, language background—measured by the amount of exposure children had to non‐English language(s)—did not change children's preferences for people who spoke “correctly,” and instead only impacted children's expectations about the likely target of foreign speech. Our work suggests that the development of linguistic register comprehension is nuanced, depending on a multitude of factors such as variety in social experience, and opens avenues for future research examining differences in linguistic register understanding and use across development.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Children can consider social relationships when evaluating liars

  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology · 2025-06-21 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  • Children and adults negatively judge emotionally hurtful lies—lies told with the knowledge that it will hurt someone’s feelings. • When directly compared, school-aged children and adults judge lying to a friend as worse than telling the same lie to an acquaintance. • Evaluations that it is meaner for a friend (vs. classmate) to lie and to fail to help follow similar developmental trajectories. Two preregistered experiments investigated whether children (3–12-year-olds; n = 456) and adults ( n = 120) from the United States more negatively evaluate child characters who tell “emotionally hurtful lies”— lies explicitly told knowing that it will make another person feel bad — to a friend than to a more distant social partner. When children and adults judged one independent emotionally hurtful lie (Study 1), they evaluated it negatively regardless of whether the liar was lying to a friend, a classmate, or an enemy. However, when comparatively evaluating two people who told the same emotionally hurtful lie (at the same time), participants judged a friend’s lie more negatively than a classmate’s lie (Study 2). Interestingly, relationship impacted evaluations of emotionally hurtful lies to a similar extent as evaluations of failures to help. Taken together, people’s evaluations of emotionally hurtful lies take social relationships into account in comparative but not independent contexts. More broadly, school-aged children and adults appear to understand that close relationships entail certain obligations, and breaking these obligations is more condemnable than engaging in the same antisocial interaction with a more distant social partner.

  PublisherDOI

• Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large‐Scale, Multi‐Lab, Coordinated Replication Study

  Developmental Science · 2024-11-26 · 31 citations

  articleOpen access

  Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried but failed to climb a hill. This sparked a new line of inquiry into the origins of social evaluations; however, replication attempts have yielded mixed results. We present a preregistered, multi-laboratory, standardized study aimed at replicating infants' preference for Helpers over Hinderers. We intended to (1) provide a precise estimate of the effect size of infants' preference for Helpers over Hinderers, and (2) determine the degree to which preferences are based on social information. Using the ManyBabies framework for big team-based science, we tested 1018 infants (567 included, 5.5-10.5 months) from 37 labs across five continents. Overall, 49.34% of infants preferred Helpers over Hinderers in the social condition, and 55.85% preferred characters who pushed up, versus down, an inanimate object in the nonsocial condition; neither proportion differed from chance or from each other. This study provides evidence against infants' prosocial preferences in the hill paradigm, suggesting the effect size is weaker, absent, and/or develops later than previously estimated. As the first of its kind, this study serves as a proof-of-concept for using active behavioral measures (e.g., manual choice) in large-scale, multi-lab projects studying infants.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Children's expectations of nationality-based behaviors differ for immigrants and nonimmigrants

  Child Development · 2024-12-11 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Children in the United States (N = 488, 4-11 years, 239 females, 248 males, one other, 53% White; data collected 2021-2022) participated in three studies investigating their expectations about immigrants. Participants recognized that immigration impacts characters' national identity and behaviors. Although previous research reported that children may essentialize nationality, participants instead reasoned flexibly about immigrant characters. Children expected immigrant characters to share behaviors and preferences with people from both their heritage and host countries, suggesting they may think immigrants hold dual national identities. Even the youngest children tested (ages 4-6) reasoned flexibly about behaviors based on immigration status. Thus, children appear to view national identity as constructed through social and cultural experiences, rather than something innate.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Probing the impact of exposure to diversity on infants’ social categorization.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 2024-01-16 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Humans learn about the world through inductive reasoning, generalizing information about an individual to others in the category. Indeed, by infancy, monolingual children expect people who speak the same language (but not people who speak different languages) to be similar in their food preferences (Liberman et al., 2016). Here, we ask whether infants who are exposed to linguistic diversity are more willing to generalize information even across language-group lines. To test this, we ran an inductive inference task and collected data on exposure to linguistic diversity at the interpersonal and neighborhood levels. Infants with more linguistically diverse social networks were more likely to generalize a food preference across speakers of different languages. However, this relationship was not seen for neighborhood diversity. We discuss implications of this work on understanding the development of bias and its malleability based on early social experiences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Was that discrimination? Perceptions of bisexual people’s relative status inform attributions of discrimination

  Group Processes & Intergroup Relations · 2024-02-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Current models of discrimination fail to account for the fact that many people belong to intermediate identity groups, that is, groups that share characteristics with both a low-status minority and a high-status majority group (e.g., biracial, bisexual), and thus do not occupy one clear position on a status hierarchy. We investigated bisexual targets to test whether perceivers rely on perceived status differentials to determine whether someone faced discrimination. As predicted, whether bisexual people were perceived as victims of discrimination depended on contextual cues about their relative status. Participants expected both gay/lesbian and bisexual individuals to face more discrimination than heterosexual individuals. But they were more likely to say that a bisexual woman who had lost out to a heterosexual woman competitor had faced discrimination compared to a bisexual woman who had lost out to a lesbian woman. These results may help make sense of how real-world discrimination claims are adjudicated.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Katherine D. Kinzler

  University of Chicago

  14 shared

• Amanda L. Woodward

  University of Chicago

  12 shared

• Alex Shaw

  University of Chicago

  6 shared

• Lauren H. Howard

  Franklin & Marshall College

  4 shared

• Nathan M. Vasquez

  Yale University

  4 shared

• Kathleen R. Sullivan

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation

  3 shared

• J. Kiley Hamlin

  University of British Columbia

  3 shared

• Katrin Rothmaler

  Leipzig University

  3 shared

Labs

• Liberman Child Studies LabPI

  Not provided

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  University of Chicago

  2016

• B.S., Psychology

  Yale University

  2011

Awards & honors

• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
• Rising Star by the American Psychological Society (2017)
• NSF CAREER Award to Investigate the Formation of Stereotypes…
• 2019 Hellman Fellows