Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Social groups highlight latent structure in the social worldand support inductive inferences about individuals. In thepresent work, we examined children and adults’ intuitionsabout shared preferences within social groups. In Exp.1, 3- to5-year-old children treated preferences as a consistent propertyof social groups; that is, children expected members of a so-cial group to like the same toys that other members have liked.However, they did not treat preferences as diagnostic of socialgroups; they did not expect individuals to belong to a groupthat shares their preferences. By contrast, in Exp.2, adultsreadily treated preferences as both a consistent and diagnos-tic property of social groups. These results suggest that chil-dren’s inferences about social groups are asymmetric: Chil-dren readily infer preferences based on group membership, butnot group membership based on preferences.