Adults expect others’ choices will be biased by investments of effort, time, or money. However, children do not similarly consider past investments when anticipating others’ actions. We examined whether prompting children about effort and emotion impacts their predictions about sunk costs. Children aged 5 to 7 years (N = 180) saw scenarios where a character collected two identical objects, one easy to obtain and the other difficult. Before children were asked which of the two objects the character will keep (sunk cost prediction), they were either asked an effort, sadness, or a control prompt. Children in the effort and sadness prompts selected the high-cost objects, suggesting they expected the character to be biased by sunk costs. However, similar to previous findings, children in the control prompt condition selected objects at chance-level. These findings suggest that if prompted, young children can anticipate others will be biased by sunk costs.

Authors:

Claudia G. Sehl: University of Waterloo; Stephanie Denison: University of Waterloo ; Ori Friedman: University of Waterloo