The value of variety and scarcity across development

Echelbarger, Margaret; Gelman, Susan A.

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2016.11.010

Cited by 40 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…In sharp contrast to children's relative indifference to scarcity per se, we have found evidence for a powerful variety preference in young children (Echelbarger & Gelman, ). By variety, we mean selecting differences among items within sets.…”

Section: Implications For Object Valuecontrasting

confidence: 80%

Children, Object Value, and Persuasion

Gelman

Echelbarger

2019

J Consum Psychol

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We argue that, contrary to standard views of development, children understand the world in terms of hidden, nonobvious structure. We review research showing that early in childhood, items are not understood strictly in terms of the features that present themselves in the immediate “here‐and‐now,” but rather are thought to have a hidden reality. We illustrate with two related but distinct examples: category essentialism, and attention to object history. We discuss the implications of each of these capacities for how children determine object value. Across a broad range of object types (natural and artifactual, real and virtual, durable and consumable), an item is evaluated very differently, depending on inferred qualities and context. In this way, children's early‐emerging conceptual frameworks influence how objects attain both psychological and monetary value, and may have important implications for which messages children find most persuasive.

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Section: Implications For Object Valuecontrasting

confidence: 80%

Children, Object Value, and Persuasion

Gelman

Echelbarger

2019

J Consum Psychol

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“…Second, it concurred with previous studies’ analytic strategy, thus again, allowing a more straightforward comparison to their findings. Third, following Echelbarger and Gelman’s () argument, setting chance at 50% provided a more conservative estimate for the presence of a scarcity bias, reasoning that children’s decision about which sticker to choose was clearly between two types of stickers, rather than among 12 individual stickers.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This change evidently required further modifications in the method, so as to make the task amenable to infants. For instance, rather than asking participants for their preferences for pictured objects (as done by Echelbarger & Gelman, ), we gave them an actual choice between objects they would get to keep (similar to Diesendruck et al, ; John et al, , in this respect). A second methodological change is that instead of presenting novel (as in Echelbarger & Gelman) or unknown (as in John et al) objects for children to choose from, we presented familiar objects that varied on a particular characteristic (i.e., balls that varied in color, or stickers of different types of balls).…”

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confidence: 99%

The Development of a Scarcity Bias

2020

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Adults’ attraction to rare objects has been variously attributed to fundamental biases related to resource availability, self‐related needs, or beliefs about social and market forces. The current three studies investigated the scarcity bias in 11‐ and 14‐month‐old infants, and 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children (N = 129). With slight methodological modifications, participants had to choose between one of 10 same‐kind‐items (abundant resource), or the only one of a different kind (scarce resource). It was found that a robust preference for the scarce resource appeared only at age 5 years. Thus, although a scarcity bias is not present in infancy, it emerges prior to comprehension of market forces. Possible accounts of this developmental finding are discussed.

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“…There are at least three reasons to think that children's choices, like adults', might be influenced by the groupings of options when children are tested with age-appropriate versions of paradigms that do elicit partition dependence reliably in adults. First, there is evidence that children diversify across options like adults (e.g., Read & Loewenstein, 1995), so at least one strategy leading to partition dependence-diversification bias-is present in childhood (see also Echelbarger & Gelman, 2017). Second, children as young as four flexibly reason about entities belonging to multiple categories (see Nguyen & Girgis, 2014, for a review), so children might draw on category groupings rather than concrete choice options when employing a diversification strategy.…”

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Partition dependence in development: Are children’s decisions shaped by the arbitrary grouping of options?

Reichelson

Zax

Patalano

et al. 2018

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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The grouping of options into arbitrary categories influences adults' decisions about allocating choices or resources among those options; this is called "partition dependence." Partition dependence has been demonstrated in a wide range of contexts in adults and is often presented as a technique for designing choice architectures that nudge people towards better decisions. Whether children also make partition dependent decisions is unknown, as are potential patterns of developmental change. In this experiment ( N = 159), we examined whether children exhibit partition dependence using a novel resource allocation task. This novel task, distributing food tokens to zoo animals, did elicit partition dependence in our developmental sample. Both older children (ages 7-10 years) and younger children (ages 3-6 years) made partition dependent allocations, and younger children exhibited a larger partition dependence effect than did older children. This work provides the first evidence that children's decisions, like adults', are influenced by the arbitrary grouping of the options, and suggests that younger children may be more susceptible to this influence, at least in the context explored here.

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The value of variety and scarcity across development

Cited by 40 publications

References 38 publications

Children, Object Value, and Persuasion

Children, Object Value, and Persuasion

The Development of a Scarcity Bias

Partition dependence in development: Are children’s decisions shaped by the arbitrary grouping of options?

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