The odds tell children what people favor

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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).