‘Children are really clever’ 

APS Janet Taylor Spence Award recipient Felix Warneken studies how children think about fairness and morality, including their understanding of social norms and the impacts those norms have on their behavior.  

Though he had never conducted any research focused on public health before, the moral dilemmas inherent within the COVID-19 pandemic presented an interesting opportunity to study if and how children respond to a sudden change in social norms.  

“We thought it would be interesting to see how kids adopt these completely novel norms that, interestingly, also often go against exactly what has been taught,” said Warneken, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 

Warneken and his team developed an experiment to mimic the social dynamics of mask wearing, but with a completely new context. In the experiment, they described a society of aliens called Furpees (Probst et al., 2023). Furpees have spikes on their bodies that can injure another Furpee if they get too close and run into one other. The Furpees have caps that they can place over their spikes to protect those around them, but the caps are heavy and uncomfortable.  

Two graphics used in the Probst et al., 2023 study. In the first image, a purple Furpee thinks of two other purple Furpees, who appear in a thought bubble. One has caps on its spikes, the other does not. In the second image, the Furpee is walking away with a blue Furpee, and because the Furpee didn't put a cap on his points, the other Furpee has a speech bubble with the word 'Ouch!' above him.

Warneken and his team developed an experiment to mimic the social dynamics of mask wearing by describing a society of aliens called Furpees. Image originally included in Probst et al., 2023.

In the study, the children were asked to think about the impacts to the individual Furpee as well as others in the community, and how the severity of that impact might influence whether each Furpee should wear a cap on their spike or not. Warneken and his coauthor Katherine McAuliffe (Boston College) also published an overview of the research in Current Directions in Psychological Science (Warneken & McAuliffe, 2025). 

Read the full article on APS.