Preschoolers' Understanding of Preferences is Modulated by Linguistic Framing

Preschoolers' Understanding of Preferences is Modulated by Linguistic Framing Taylor F. Holubar (tholubar@stanford.edu) Department of Psychology Stanford University Ellen M. Markman (markman@stanford.edu) Department of Psychology Stanford University Abstract consequence of a non-representational theory of mind could be that a child’s evaluative opinions (such as whether she finds ice cream delicious or not) are also taken as direct reflections of objective properties of the world. Such a belief should lead pre-representational children to expect everyone else also to find ice cream delicious, and the subjective, idiosyncratic nature of preferences to be lost. Some evidence does exist that very young children in fact treat subjective properties like “deliciousness” as features of objects rather than as mental states tied to individuals. Gergely, Egyed, & Kiraly (2007) report that 14-month-olds expect adults to treat an object in accordance with the total amount of liking or disliking for the object the infant has witnessed, irrespective of whether a particular adult has previously demonstrated liking or disliking for the object. In other words, infants do not reason about an object’s likability in terms of a particular person’s opinion about that object. Instead, they seem to aggregate information across individuals and associate that totality with the object, not with the individuals who produce the information. This finding is consistent with a relatively impoverished understanding of mental states, whereby children conceptualize beliefs (including those about an item’s likability or desirability) as reflecting objective states in the world. At the same time, the strongest version of this hypothesis is not borne out in the data: at least in some cases, slightly older children respond appropriately to desires different from their own. Children as young as 18 months recognize that adults may desire different foods than they themselves do: when an adult who has previously shown positive affect towards broccoli and negative affect toward goldfish crackers requests more food, 18-month-olds (but not 14- month-olds) respond appropriately to requests for food (Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997). In some contexts, two-year- olds also show similar understanding of others’ desires (Ma & Xu, 2011). For example, children predict that a character will be happy when she satisfies her desire to play with a given toy, even when the participant has previously said she would choose to play with a different toy over that toy (Wellman & Woolley, 1991). Given these discrepant findings, important work remains in charting out how children develop an adult-like understanding of preferences. In this paper, we present two studies in which we specifically probe how preschoolers reason about unconventional preferences--preferences that, while likely not espoused by the child, nonetheless are not Reasoning about others' preferences is an important aspect of understanding the social world. Although there is some evidence that young children reason appropriately about others' discrepant preferences, there are reasons to suspect this ability remains fragile through the preschool years. In particular, we argue that the way preferences are expressed may tap into humans' lifelong tendency toward naive realism, the belief that my way of seeing the world is the normative, correct one. We present data demonstrating that tolerance for unconventional opinions increases during the preschool years but remains susceptible to influence by linguistic framing. Keywords: theory of mind; preferences; naive realism; linguistic framing effects. Introduction Statements of preference are a profoundly strange phenomenon. In principle, preferences are subjective: although finding ice cream delicious may be normative and all but universal, “ice cream is delicious” is not true or false in the way that “ice cream is sugary” is true or “ice cream is hot” is false. Yet statements of this form--describing a subjective valuation as if it were an objective fact--are widespread and remarkably unremarkable. Could talking about preferences as if they were facts influence the way people reason about preferences? We suggest that preferences are a difficult concept to reason about (and particularly susceptible to effects of framing) because they hold a fundamentally different epistemic status from facts. They require acknowledging that one’s own (often strongly held) beliefs are not verifiably correct, and that even totally opposite beliefs should be respected as valid. These recognitions require sophisticated perspective taking skills, which preschoolers notoriously lack. However, adults also show similar biases, as the literature on naive realism demonstrates (Robinson, Keltner, Ward, & Ross, 1995). These observations lead us to ask: how do children reason about preferences that differ from their own? Does the way we talk about preferences impact their reasoning? It is well documented that preschoolers begin passing classic tests of false-belief understanding around age four (see Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001, for a meta-analysis). A prominent explanation of this shift is that children develop the insight that the mind operates on representations of the world, rather than veridical copies of the world. In other words, for a pre-representational child, mental states are taken as exactly reflecting the state of the world. One