Young Children Use Statistical Sampling to Infer the Preferences of Other People

Abstract

Psychological scientists use statistical information to determine the workings of fellow humans. We argue so do young children. In a few years, children progress from viewing human actions as intentional and goal-directed to reasoning about the psychological causes underlying such actions. Here we show that preschoolers and 20-month-old infants can use statistical information – namely, a violation of random sampling – to infer that an agent is expressing a preference for one object over another. Children saw a person remove 5 items of one type from a container of objects. Preschoolers and infants only inferred a preference for that type of object when there was a mismatch between the sample and population. Mere outcome consistency, time spent with and positive attention toward the objects did not lead children to infer a preference. The findings provide an important demonstration of how statistical learning could underpin the rapid acquisition of early psychological knowledge.

The Naïve Utility Calculus: Computational Principles Underlying Commonsense Psychology

“…Infants appeared to expect all toys to share the hidden property when the blue balls were common (suggesting that the agent sampled three blue balls by chance), but not when they were rare (suggesting that the agent sampled three blue balls selectively). In the absence of a clear purpose behind an agent's sampling actions, infants attribute preferences [9,11]. For instance, if an agent pulls three frogs in a row from a box that contains mostly ducks, 20-month-olds infer that the agent prefers frogs to ducks; they do not infer this if the box contains more frogs than ducks or if the box contains only frogs.…”

“…Work on how children reason about other agents' goals [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8], desires [9][10][11], beliefs [12][13][14][15][16][17][18], and pro-social behavior [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] has advanced our understanding of what in our commonsense psychology is at work in early infancy [30][31][32] and what develops [16][17][33][34][35]. Nonetheless, major theoretical questions remain unresolved.…”

The origins of inquiry: inductive inference and exploration in early childhood

“…Moreover, infants suspend such inferences if the experimenter who pulls the sample first expresses a preference for the minority ball [52] (see also [53]). Slightly older infants make the same kind of inference in reverse: if an agent selects only frogs from a box containing mostly ducks, children infer that the agent has a preference for frogs, and the more improbable the sample, the more likely children are to assume the agent has a preference [54,55]. Thus before they are two, infants seem to understand that evidence can be sampled in different ways, that different sampling processes will generate different evidence, and thus that different generalizations are warranted.…”

Statistical judgments are influenced by the implied likelihood that samples represent the same population

“…For example, infants' inferences are affected by whether samples are shown to be randomly or nonrandomly selected (Xu & Denison, 2009), and they can detect that samples are unrepresentative of a known population, even when sampling method is hidden (Kushnir, Xu & Wellman, 2010). Furthermore, children are more likely to generalize attributes from samples to general populations when given diverse samples that are (presumably) more representative of a general population rather than homogeneous samples, which could represent a particular subpopulation (Rhodes, Brickman & Gelman, 2008; see also Osherson, Smith, Wilkie, Lopez & Shafir, 1990).…”