Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People expect that others will be biased by sunk costs in their decisions. However, previous work has shown that children do not hold this same expectation. In our work, we examined whether children make other inferences about sunk costs. Specifically, we wondered whether they would anticipate that sunk costs lead others to experience negative emotions, like sadness. In two experiments, we showed children aged five to seven years (N = 168) agents who expended high- or low-costs to obtain objects that were subsequently lost or broken. We found that from around age five, children predicted that an agent will be sadder if they invested greater effort to obtain an object. We show that this expectation is not based on a simple tendency to attribute greater emotions to agents who overcame larger obstacles. Our work shows that children are not entirely insensitive to sunk costs, as previous work may have suggested.