The first location heuristic: An early emerging way of judging where things belong

Judgments about where things belong guide people's expectations, actions, and social evaluations. In this article, we provide evidence for an early emerging first location heuristic that informs judgments about where things belong. According to this heuristic, objects belong where they were first encountered. We investigated this heuristic in both children aged 3-7 (N = 951) and in adults (N = 1,238) in Canada and the United States. In each experiment, participants judged where objects belonged in scenarios where an object first appeared in one location but was then moved. In Experiments 1-3, children and adults mostly judged that artifacts found indoors belong in their first locations, though this tendency was reduced (especially for adults) for objects moved by humans rather than natural forces. These experiments also ruled out two low-level explanations for the findings. Experiments 4 and 5 then found that children also use the heuristic with natural objects found outdoors and provided mixed evidence about adults. Experiment 5 also found that children and adults see the first location as normative. We discuss two explanations for why people use the heuristic to judge where things belong. One reason is that an object's first location is often informative about its history, for instance, indicating where the object is typically found or where it was intentionally placed. The heuristic, though, could also express the basic belief that things belong where they originate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).