Have your cake, and your asparagus, too: Young children expect variety-seeking behavior from agents with diverse desires

Abstract

While adults robustly seek variety and expect others to do so, it is unclear whether children expect others to enjoy and preferentially choose variety in the domain of food. Seventy-nine children encountered an agent, depicted by a puppet, who liked two diverse foods. The children themselves liked only one of these foods. Older children (M = 5;11) expected this agent to be happier with, and to preferentially choose, a serving of both foods rather than a serving of a single food type, consistent with variety-seeking preferences. Five- and 6-year-olds can therefore simultaneously represent others’ diverse desires as co-existing and causing preferences for variety over homogeneity. In contrast, younger children (M = 4;0) did not robustly attribute variety-seeking preferences to this agent. Predictions of variety-seeking food preferences may relate to children’s developing theory of mind abilities and could be harnessed in nutritional interventions to improve children’s diets.