Consistent but not diagnostic: Preschoolers’ intuitions about shared preferences within social groups

Social groups highlight structure in the social world and support induction about individuals. In the present work, we examined children’s and adults’ intuitions about shared preferences within social groups. In Experiment 1, we find that 3to 5-year-old children treat preferences as a consistent property of social groups: that is, they expect members of a group to like the same toys as their teammates. However, they do not treat preferences as diagnostic of a group; they do not expect individuals to belong to a group that shares their preferences. By contrast, in Experiment 2, we find that adults treat preferences as both a consistent and diagnostic property of social groups. Our results suggest that children’s inferences about social groups are asymmetric: children readily infer preferences based on group membership, but not group membership based on preferences.