Young Children Can Infer Information Preferences From Goals and Recommend Appropriate Sources to Others

As adults, we intuitively understand how others' goals influence their information-seeking preferences. For example, you might recommend a dense book full of mechanistic details to someone trying to learn about a topic in-depth, but a more lighthearted book flled with surprising stories to someone seeking entertainment. Moreover, you might do this with confdence despite knowing few details about either book. Even though we offer or receive such recommendations frequently as adults, we know little about how the ability to evaluate and recommend information sources to others develops. Two studies examined how children (6-9 years, Eastern U.S. residents, n = 311) and adults (U.S. residents, n = 180) select mechanistic and entertaining information sources for others depending on their goals. Participants recommended books containing mechanistic information to agents who wanted to learn and entertaining information to agents who wanted to have fun. In contrast to adults who strongly favored entertaining books, children recommended both kinds of books equally to a generally curious agent. These results suggest children can infer others' information-seeking preferences based on their goals and recommend appropriate information sources to satisfy those goals despite possessing little topical knowledge themselves.Public Significance Statement The current fndings demonstrate young children can reason about and recommend information sources to others despite often possessing little relevant knowledge themselves. These fndings also highlight a potential decline in interest in causal mechanisms into adulthood, which is of potential importance to educators wishing to increase interest and curiosity toward science, technology, engineering, and mathematics topics.