Agents of possibility: Specifying which person an event involved helps children gauge what is possible

Children often deny the possibility of unusual and improbable events and immoral actions. Three preregistered experiments on 5- and 6-year-old children (N = 154, 47% female, 53% male, tested across three sites in Canada with varied ethnic compositions between March and September 2025) find that children better recognize that improbable events are possible when the events include agents who could plausibly be involved in them and who might want to produce them. In Experiments 1 and 2, children affirmed possibility more when unusual events were described as involving thematically related agents rather than unrelated or indefinite ones. Children also affirmed possibility more for actions that could be voluntarily chosen than for incidents that might happen involuntarily. In Experiment 3, children affirmed possibility more when improbable events involved agents with relevant motives and locations, but this did not affect children's judgments about the possibility of acting immorally. These findings suggest that children often deny the possibility of improbable events because they fail to recall relevant knowledge useful for envisaging the circumstances behind the events.