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Adults expect others' choices will be biased by investments of effort, time, or money. However, children do not similarly consider past investments when anticipating others' actions. We examined whether prompting children about effort and emotion impacts their predictions about sunk costs. Children aged 5 to 7 years (N = 180) saw scenarios where a character collected two identical objects, one easy to obtain and the other difficult. Before children were asked which of the two objects the character will keep (sunk cost prediction), they were either asked an effort, sadness, or a control prompt. Children in the effort and sadness prompts selected the high-cost objects, suggesting they expected the character to be biased by sunk costs. However, similar to previous findings, children in the control prompt condition selected objects at chance-level. These findings suggest that if prompted, young children can anticipate others will be biased by sunk costs.

People use incomplete social network information to infer relationships. For example, if two individuals have many mutual friends, people infer they are friends with each other. We examined whether these inferences depend on domain-specific knowledge about social relationships, or instead depend on domain general-reasoning about statistics and proportions. In two experiments, participants (N=526) either saw partial information about social networks, like friendships between people, or about non-social networks, like wired connections between electrical parts. They then judged if two entities in each network were directly connected to each other. The entities varied in the number of connections and the proportion of mutual connections. People made similar judgments across social and non-social networks: with greater proportion of mutual connections, the two entities were judged as more likely to be connected to each other. In sum, inferences about networks might primarily depend on reasoning about statistics and proportions.

People expect that others will be biased by sunk costs in their decisions. However, previous work has shown that children do not hold this same expectation. In our work, we examined whether children make other inferences about sunk costs. Specifically, we wondered whether they would anticipate that sunk costs lead others to experience negative emotions, like sadness. In two experiments, we showed children aged five to seven years (N = 168) agents who expended high- or low-costs to obtain objects that were subsequently lost or broken. We found that from around age five, children predicted that an agent will be sadder if they invested greater effort to obtain an object. We show that this expectation is not based on a simple tendency to attribute greater emotions to agents who overcame larger obstacles. Our work shows that children are not entirely insensitive to sunk costs, as previous work may have suggested.

People tend to avoid wasting resources, but little is known about when this emerges in development. Though young children are often wasteful with food and other items, previous work suggests that children consider waste in other judgments. Here, we examined if children anticipate that others should minimize waste. In two experiments (total N = 195), children chose which of two foods someone should eat (Experiment 1; 3-7-year-olds) or two papers someone should make a snowflake with (Experiment 2; 5-year-olds). One of the options would result in minimal waste (i.e., a small food/paper) while the other would result in greater waste (i.e., a large food/paper). Children did not anticipate that others would choose smaller foods, however, at around five years they predicted that others would choose smaller paper. These findings contribute to our knowledge of the development of waste aversion and may extend our understanding of waste aversion as a form of efficiency.

Children have a robust social preference for people similar to them, like those who share their language, accent, and race. In the present research, we show that this preference can diminish when children consider who they want to learn about. Across three experiments, 4- to 6-year-olds (total N = 160; 74 female, 86 male, from the Waterloo region in Canada, a predominantly White and middle-class region) and adults (N = 103) saw pairs of characters. One character was from nearby and had characteristics typical of the participating child's location (e.g., playing soccer), whereas the other character was from far away and had characteristics atypical of children's location (e.g., playing hurling). In Experiment 1, children had no preference when judging who they liked better, but preferred foreign characters when judging who they wanted to learn about. Experiments 2 and 3 followed up by using procedures where participants were not told anything about the characters besides whether they were local or foreign. Children and adults preferred local characters when choosing who they liked, but preferred local characters less when choosing who to learn about. These findings show that children's preferences for similar others are flexible and depend on the judgment they are making.

When assessing the quality of a machine, people might consider the machine’s outputs—how well it serves its function. Alternatively, people might also consider the efficiency of the machine. We investigated this possibility in two experiments (N = 392). In each experiment, participants saw pairs of machines, one with simple inside parts and one with more complex inside parts. Machines either had the same output or unknown outputs, and people judged which of the two machines was better. When the machines had the same output, participants in both experiments judged that machines with simpler inside parts were better than ones with more complex insides. However, when machines’ functions were unknown, people predominantly judged that machines with complex insides were better. Together, our work shows that people consider both parts and functions of machines when inferring quality.

Facebook sends users friend suggestions when they have friends in common with others. However, how do people actually consider mutual friendships when inferring whether two individuals are friends? We examined how people (N=352) rely on numerical factors when judging whether individuals are friends based on their mutual connections. Participants saw two target individuals and their friends within a group, and judged if the targets were friends with each other. Experiment 1 manipulated the number of mutual friends and the number of friends each target had. Experiment 2 manipulated the proportion of these two factors. People were more likely to infer friendships when I) targets had more mutual friends; II) targets had fewer friends each; and III) there was a high proportion of mutual friends, which are all factors that impact the likelihood of targets’ friendship. In sum, people consider relevant numerical information about mutual friends when making friendship judgments.

We examined how people consider information about probability and choices when inferring preferences. Participants (N=652) read stories about an agent who chose between two locations with opposite proportions of toys. The choice was between two open trays of toys or between two probabilistic toy machines. When the agent only chose which location to go to, participants judged the agent preferred the majority toy in the chosen location, regardless of whether the choice was between trays or machines (Experiments 1&2). However, judgments differed across these conditions when participants learned the agent ended up with a minority toy (Experiment 3). When the agent chose this toy from a tray, participants judged the agent preferred it to majority toys; when the agent received this toy from a machine, they judged the agent preferred majority toys. These findings show that when the outcome of a choice is unknown, determinative choices are treated as probabilistic.

In pursuing goals, people seek favorable odds. We investigated whether young children use this fact to infer goals from people's actions across two experiments on Canadian 3- to 7-year-old children (N = 316; 167 girls, 149 boys). Participants' demographic information was not formally collected, but the region is predominantly middle-class and White. In Experiment 1, 3-year-old children saw a story where one agent went to a gumball machine with mostly red gumballs and another agent went to a machine with mostly purple ones. When asked which agent wanted a red gumball, children mostly selected the agent who chose the mostly red machine. Moreover, children responded at chance in a control condition where they judged which agent knew they would get a red gumball. In Experiment 2a, 3- to 7-year-old children saw a story where an agent either chose between two gumball machines or two open bowls of gumballs. In both conditions, the agent chose a location with mostly red gumballs over one with mostly blue gumballs but ended up with a blue gumball. Children were more likely to infer the agent had wanted a red gumball when the agent had made a probabilistic choice (machines) than a determinative choice (bowls), though inferences that the red gumball was preferred also increased with age. In Experiment 2b, a preregistered follow-up, American adults responded similarly to the older children. Together our findings suggest that children infer goals by drawing on the understanding that people seek favorable odds, though the clearest findings come from children aged 6 years and older.

Although people take care of their own possessions, they also engage in stewardship and take care of things they do not own. Here, we examined what young children infer when they observe stewardship behavior of an object. Through four experiments on predominantly middle-class Canadian children (total N = 350, 168 girls and 182 boys from a predominantly White and middle-class region), we found that children as young as 4 or 5 infer feelings of ownership from stewardship behaviors and distinguish between psychological and legal ownership. They also understand that psychological and legal ownership are independent as one can exist without the other, and children as young as 3 may link stewardship with welfare concerns. We also suggest that while stewardship has been shown to be a consequence of psychological ownership, it is also likely to be an antecedent. As future stewards of our resources, young children's understanding of the link between psychological ownership and stewardship links directly to sustainability concerns. We contribute theoretically both to the child development and psychological ownership literatures.

The use of algorithmic decision-making is steadily increasing, but people may have misgivings about machines making moral decisions. In two experiments (N = 551), we examined whether people expect machines to weigh information differently than humans in making moral decisions. We found that people expected that a computer judge would be more likely to convict than a human judge, and that both judge types would be more likely to convict based on individuating information than on base-rate information. While our main hypotheses were not supported, these findings suggest that people might anticipate machines will commit to decisions based on less evidence than a human would require, providing a possible explanation for why people are averse to machines making moral decisions.

We explore whether people’s judgments about the possibility of events are predicted by their knowledge of similar events. Participants read 80 events from a list including events that were ordinary, unusual, and impossible. Participants rated whether the events were possible or whether the events were similar to events they knew to have happened. The averaged ratings for each judgment were strongly correlated, and the correlation remained significant in an analysis limited to a subset of the events that were neither viewed as totally impossible, or as extremely similar to known events. These findings provide preliminary evidence that adults may judge whether events are possible by relying on a memory-based heuristic which aims to identify whether these events are similar to known events.

Children are often drawn to novelty, but these preferences may depend on their goals. In two experiments (N = 302), we show that children have differing preferences for novelty when seeking information compared to when they are asked to prioritize other goals. In Experiment 1, 4-7-year-olds wanted to have typical items (e.g., a four-legged chair) and learn about atypical items (e.g., a ten-legged chair). In Experiment 2, 4-6- year-olds wanted to learn about foreign characters, but liked foreign and local characters equally. We propose that children prefer to learn about novel instances for the promise of new information, which is evident in at least two domains (artifacts and people). However, this preference diminishes when children are asked about who they like, and it reverses to a familiarity preference when choosing between artifacts to acquire. In sum, our findings suggest that children’s preferences for novelty versus familiarity are sensitive to different goals.

Children often say that strange and improbable events, like eating pickle-flavored ice cream, are impossible. Two experiments explored whether these beliefs are explained by limits in children's causal knowledge. Participants were 423 predominantly White Canadian 4- to 7-year-olds (44% female) tested in 2020-2021. Providing children with causal information about ordinary events did not lead them to affirm that improbable events are possible, and they more often affirmed improbable events after merely learning that a similar event had occurred. However, children were "most" likely to affirm events if they learned "how" similar events happened (OR = 2.16). The findings suggest that knowledge of causal circumstances may only impact children's beliefs about the possibility "after" they are able to draw connections between potential events and known events.

Probability influences our social inferences. Here, we explored whether preschoolers use probabilistic information to inferothers desires. Sixty 3-year-olds were shown stories where one character went to a gumball machine with mostly redgumballs and just a few purple ones and another character went to a machine with the reverse distribution. Both charactersreceived a red gumball. Children in one between-subjects condition were asked who wanted a red gumball and children ina control condition were asked who knew they would get a red gumball. Children mostly selected the character who wentto the machine with more red gumballs when asked about desires but not when asked about knowledge. This suggests that3-year-olds can use proportions to infer others desires.

People often over value their current property. For example,even young children will choose to keep their current propertyover trading it for property of similar utility (Hartley & Fisher,2018). In two experiments (N = 180), we examined howchildren aged 3 and 4 weigh the potential loss of existingproperty against the gain of property in their reasoning aboutothers’ actions. We found that by 4-years-old, children expectothers to prioritize the retention of existing property over theacquisition of new property. We suggest that this expectationreflects an understanding that people often value what theyalready own more than what they can potentially gain. Wediscuss the implications of our findings for competing theoriesof ownership reasoning, and for children’s reasoning about lossaversion.

Children often judge that strange and improbable events areimpossible, whereas adults usually accept the possibility ofsuch events. This shows that children’s reasoning aboutpossibility is immature, but it remains unclear how childrenreason about the possibility of improbable events. We explorewhether children use a novel event’s similarity to a knownevent to infer whether the event can happen. We told 4- to 6-year-olds (N=120) either ordinary or improbable facts and thenasked if a related improbable event was also possible. The factscontained no causal information that could be extended to theoccurrence of a similar event. Children who heard improbablefacts more often agreed that similar improbable events werepossible than children who heard ordinary facts. This suggeststhat the mere knowledge that an event can happen influenceschildren’s beliefs about the possibility of other unfamiliar-but-similar events.

When people invest a lot in completing a project or in obtaining a resource, they often overvalue it. This sunk costbias leads people to persist in pursuing failing projects, and to favor resources they have invested in over alternatives.We investigated whether children (N=135) and adults (N=150) consider this bias when predicting peoples choices. InExperiments 1 and 2, 4-6-year-olds and adults saw stories where an agent collected two identical objects, one easy toobtain and one difficult.They then predicted which object the agent would keep. Experiment 3 used similar stories toexamine 6-year-olds predictions about how they would act in this situation. Adults were sensitive to sunk costs, butchildren were not. These findings suggest that young children may not show the sunk cost bias, and also may struggle toanticipate how cognitive biases can lead people to depart from making rational choices.

How we feel about an outcome often depends on how close an alternative outcome was to occurring. In four experiments, we investigated whether predominantly White, middle-class, Canadian children (N = 425, Experiments 1-3) and American adults (N = 227, Experiment 4) consider close counterfactual alternatives when inferring other people's emotions. In Experiment 1, 6-year-olds (but not 4- and 5-year-olds) inferred that an agent would feel sadder about winning a mediocre prize if she later found out that a more attractive one could have easily been won. However, children of all ages failed to judge whether the better outcome could have easily happened. In Experiment 2, when 5- and 6-year-olds knew the locations of the prizes beforehand, they inferred that an agent would be equally happy about winning a mediocre prize, regardless if she almost won a better prize or not. Again, they did not recognize when the better outcome was a close counterfactual possibility. In Experiment 3, we included extra cues to the closeness of the alternative and both 5- and 6-year-olds inferred that she would feel sadder about winning a mediocre prize, and 6-year-olds acknowledged that the attractive prize was a close counterfactual alternative. In Experiment 4, adults considered close counterfactuals when inferring emotions. Our findings suggest that close counterfactuals influence children's emotion inferences before they become able to acknowledge their closeness.

Some outcomes are brought about by intentional agents with access to information and others are not. Children use a variety of cues to infer the causes of outcomes, such as statistical reasoning (e.g., the probability of the outcome) and theory of mind (e.g., a person's perceptual access, preferences, or knowledge). Here we show that children use these cues to infer cheating, a finding which informs our understanding of the flexibility of children's theory of mind. In four experiments (N = 444), 4‐ to 7‐year‐olds saw vignettes about blindfolded agents retrieving 10 gumballs from a distribution of yummy and yucky gumballs. Children were then asked if agents were really blindfolded or had peeked. We manipulated the probability of the outcome (i.e., the correspondence between the distribution sampled from and the outcome produced) and the ordering of the outcome was patterned (e.g., five yummy then five yucky) or haphazard. From age 5, children began to use both cues to infer cheating, and also showed signs of flexibly integrating these cues. Together, these findings show that young children can detect cheaters, and that their theory of mind reasoning is flexible and not based on simple and rigid rules (e.g., equating not‐seeing with failure). The findings also suggest that children use probabilistic reasoning to infer knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four experiments examined Canadian 2- to 3-year-old children's (N = 224; 104 girls, 120 boys) thoughts about shared preferences. Children saw sets of items, and identified theirs and another person's preferences. Children expected that food preferences would be more likely to be shared than color preferences, regardless of whether the items were similar or different in appeal (Experiments 1-3). A final study replicated these findings while also exploring children's expectations about activity and animal preferences. Across all studies, children expected shared preferences at surprisingly low rates (never higher than chance). Overall, these findings suggest that young children understand that some preferences are more subjective than others, and that these expectations are driven by beliefs about domains of preferences.

Academics across widely ranging disciplines all pursue knowledge, but they do so using vastly different methods. Do these academics therefore also have different ideas about when someone possesses knowledge? Recent experimental findings suggest that intuitions about when individuals have knowledge may vary across groups; in particular, the concept of knowledge espoused by the discipline of philosophy may not align with the concept held by laypeople. Across two studies, we investigate the concept of knowledge held by academics across seven disciplines (N = 1,581) and compare these judgments to those of philosophers (N = 204) and laypeople (N = 336). We find that academics and laypeople share a similar concept of knowledge, while philosophers have a substantially different concept. These experiments show that (a) in contrast to philosophers, other academics and laypeople attribute knowledge to others in some "Gettier" situations; (b) academics and laypeople are much less likely to attribute knowledge when reminded of the possibility of error, but philosophers are not affected by this reminder; and (c) non-philosophy academics are overall more skeptical about knowledge than laypeople or philosophers. These findings suggest that academics across a wide range of disciplines share a similar concept of knowledge, and that this concept aligns closely with the intuitions held by laypeople, and differs considerably from the concept of knowledge described in the philosophical literature, as well as the epistemic intuitions of philosophers themselves.

The ability to anticipate the future improves markedly acrossthe preschool years. One major area of improvement is in chil-dren’s ability to consider their future preferences. Whereas5-year-olds understand they will prefer adult items in the fu-ture, 3-year-olds indicate they will continue to prefer childitems. In the present research, we show that preschoolers(N=120) show an ownership-advantage in their future-orientedthinking—they are better able to indicate which objects theywill own as adults than to indicate what they will like. Thesefindings are informative about the basis for children’s difficultyanticipating their future preferences, and also reveal differ-ences between how children think about ownership and prefer-ences.

The ability to infer other people’s emotions is an importantaspect of children’s social cognition. Here, we examinedwhether 4- to 6-year-olds use probability to infer otherpeople’s happiness. Children saw a scenario where a girlreceives two desired and two undesired gumballs from agumball machine and were asked to rate how the girl feelsabout this outcome. Children either saw the gumballs comefrom a machine that had mostly desired gumballs or amachine that had mostly undesired gumballs. Five- and 6-year-olds rated the girl as being happier when the gumballscame from a machine that had mostly undesired gumballs.Four-year-olds, on the other hand, rated the girl’s happinesssimilarly regardless of whether the machine held mostlydesired or undesired gumballs. These findings show that bythe age of 5, children use probability to infer happiness.Further, they demonstrate that children understand that ourhappiness with an outcome depends on whether a better orworse outcome was initially more likely.

In 4 experiments, we show that young children (total N = 290) use information about supply and demand to infer the desirability of resources. In each experiment, children saw scenarios about sandwiches from different shops, which varied in supply (number of sandwiches produced for the day) and demand (number of customers attracted). In Experiments 1 and 2, 5- to 6-year-olds gave higher desirability ratings for sandwiches from shops with greater than lesser demand when supply was held constant. In Experiment 3, 5- to 7-year-olds gave higher desirability ratings for sandwiches from shops with less than more supply when demand was held constant. Finally, in Experiment 4, 5- to 6-year-olds were more likely to judge that sandwiches came from a good shop (rather than from a bad one) when demand exceeded supply than when supply exceeded demand. Together, the findings reveal a way that children can infer how desirable resources are, without needing to incur the costs that would normally be required to obtain and sample the resources themselves.

Can children tell how different a speaker's accent is from their own? In Experiment 1 (N = 84), four- and five-year-olds heard speakers with different accents and indicated where they thought each speaker lived relative to a reference point on a map that represented their current location. Five-year-olds generally placed speakers with stronger accents (as judged by adults) at more distant locations than speakers with weaker accents. In contrast, four-year-olds did not show differences in where they placed speakers with different accents. In Experiment 2 (N = 56), the same sentences were low-pass filtered so that only prosodic information remained. This time, children judged which of five possible aliens had produced each utterance, given a reference speaker. Children of both ages showed differences in which alien they chose based on accent, and generally rated speakers with foreign accents as more different from their native accent than speakers with regional accents. Together, the findings show that preschoolers perceive accent distance, that children may be sensitive to the distinction between foreign and regional accents, and that preschoolers likely use prosody to differentiate among accents.

The ability to anticipate the future improves significantly across the preschool years. Whereas 5-year-olds understand that they will prefer adult items in the future, 3-year-olds indicate they will continue to prefer child items. We explore these age-related changes in future-oriented cognition by comparing children's inferences about their future preferences with judgments about their future ownership. In Experiment 1, we show that 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 120) exhibit an ownership advantage in their future thinking--they are better able to indicate which objects they will own as adults than to indicate which they will prefer. We propose 2 explanations for this finding. First, children may rely more heavily on their semantic knowledge when inferring ownership than when inferring preferences, allowing them to sidestep the difficult task of mentally projecting themselves into the future. Second, ownership inferences may involve less conflict than preference inferences (e.g., conflict between a child's present and future desires). In Experiment 2, we test these accounts by comparing 3-year-olds' (N = 120) judgments about their own future ownership and preferences with judgments about what a present adult owns and prefers. We replicate the ownership advantage from Experiment 1 and further find that the ownership advantage holds when reasoning about a present adult. Our findings therefore support the conflict account, suggesting children struggle to infer what they will prefer as adults because their present and future preferences are in conflict.

Young children often deny that improbable events are possible. We examined whether children aged 5-7 (N = 300) might have more success in recognizing that these events are possible if they considered whether the events could happen in a distant country. Children heard about improbable and impossible events (Experiments 1A, 1B, and 2) and about ordinary events (Experiment 2) and either judged whether the events could happen in a distant country or locally (Experiments 1A and 2) or with their location unspecified (Experiment 1B). Children were more likely to judge that extraordinary events could happen in a distant country than when the same events were described locally or with location unspecified; also, older children were more likely to deny these events could happen when they were local compared with when their location was unspecified. We also found some evidence that manipulating distance affects judgments more strongly for improbable events than for impossible one. Together, the findings show that children's assessments of whether hypothetical events are possible are affected by the geographic context of the events. The findings are consistent with accounts holding that children normally assess whether hypothetical events are possible by drawing on their knowledge of the ordinary world but further suggest that children modify this approach when considering events in distant lands.