Poster #41 - Young Children Show an Ownership-Advantage in Their Future-Thinking

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

People think about the future often and use such simulations to guide their decisions in the present (Atance & O’Neill, 2001; Szpunar, Spreng, & Schacter, 2014). Correctly anticipating the future is difficult, though, and one reason for this is that people often fail to anticipate the extent to which they will change in the future (Quoidbach, Gilbert, & Wilson, 2013). This is especially true for young children, who often struggle to imagine how they will change when they grow up (Atance & Caza, 2018; Bélanger, Atance, Varghese, Nguyen, & Vendetti, 2014; Lee & Atance, 2016).

In the present experiments, we compare preschooler’s judgements about their future preferences with their judgements about what they will own as adults. We expect that inferring future ownership will be easier for children (Experiment 1), and test two hypotheses for the observed ownership-advantage by comparing judgements about their future selves with judgements about a present adult (Experiment 2). First, inferring future preferences may require children to envision a change in their mental state over time, whereas inferring future ownership may instead allow them to lean more heavily on their semantic knowledge of adulthood. On this view, the ownership-advantage should disappear when children infer what an adult owns and likes at present, as this task does not require imagining a mental shift. Second, children may find it easier to infer future ownership than future preferences because the former task introduces less conflict. Children may have to override their current preference for child items when asked to indicate what they will like as adults, and children often find it difficult to reason about desires that conflict with their own (Cassidy et al., 2005; Moore et al., 1995). On this view, the ownership-advantage should remain regardless of perspective taken.

In Experiment 1, we showed 3- to 5-year-olds (N=120) a slideshow featuring pairings of adult and child items. Half of the children were asked what they would like best when they grow up, and half were asked what they would have. Children were more likely to select adult items when asked what they would have than when asked what they would like, p=.030. Children were also more likely with age to select adult items, p<.001 (Figure 1). In Experiment 2, we replicated our original finding with 3-year-olds (N=120) and added a further condition in which we asked what an adult prefers or owns at present. Children were more likely to select adult items when asked what an adult likes or has at present than when asked what they will like or have in the future, p=.001. However, regardless of perspective (future-self or present-adult), children were more likely to choose adult items when asked about ownership than preferences, p=.035 (Figure 2).

Our findings reveal an ownership-advantage in children’s future-thinking. More specifically, the results suggest children may struggle to infer what they will prefer as adults because their present and future preferences are in conflict. Further, our findings suggest 3-year-olds may have a general difficulty with reasoning about the distant future.

Authors

• Brandon Wade Goulding, University of Waterloo
  Presenting Author

• Cristina M. Atance, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ori Friedman, University of Waterloo
  Non-Presenting Author