Sarah Gerson

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, it's interesting because I think Barbies are often kind of villainized in some ways.

But the idea is that parents often think of dolls as kind of just for fun or sometimes even as negative.

And I study social cognition.

So kind of how do we understand other people?

How do we interact with other people and learn from them?

And I thought dolls actually are a good case where we might be able to kind of practice those social skills that we use in an interaction.

with another person there or sometimes even without another person there.

So we were interested in whether there are these kinds of social benefits of dolls when kids naturally play with them.

So that was our initial goal.

And we started a series of studies about this about six or seven years ago now.

So this is the newest kind of piece of it.

Yeah, so in developmental psychology, we refer to theory of mind as kind of a set of skills that helps us understand other people.

So it's a theory about what's happening inside someone else's mind.

And the way that we test this, we can test it in a variety of ways, but oftentimes it's about thinking about the fact that someone else might

think, believe, know or want something different from what we ourselves think, believe, know or want.

And as adults, sometimes that's really natural.

Some adults still struggle with this.

But particularly in children, we see kind of this development in those early kind of elementary school primary years where children are starting to learn that, oh, they might think something different from me and they might use that to kind of like play tricks on other people.

or they might use it to kind of learn about other people and interact with them better.