Children’s evaluations of scarce (and abundant) resources: When does the “why” matter?

Determining value is key to reasoning about resources. Scarcity has been proposed as an easily accessible cue children can use to judge value, but prior studies have yielded inconsistent results, raising the question of whether children may be sensitive to the reasons underlying why items are scarce. We tested whether children (N = 145, ages 4–9 years) used object scarcity as a cue to value and, if so, whether they considered the reasons underlying scarcity (or abundance, as a comparison). A preference for scarcity increased with age, and children were more likely to select scarce objects when the reasons for their availability were popularity and intrinsic nature. Together, our findings suggest that researchers should consider how resource availability is framed when exploring children’s evaluations of resources.

确定价值是对资源进行推理的关键。稀缺性被认为是儿童可用于判断价值的一种容易获取的线索，但先前的研究结果并不一致，这引发了一个问题：儿童是否可能对物品稀缺的原因敏感。我们测试了儿童（N = 145，年龄4 - 9岁）是否将物品稀缺作为判断价值的线索，如果是，他们是否会考虑稀缺（或丰富，作为对比）背后的原因。对稀缺的偏好随年龄增长而增加，并且当物品可获取的原因是受欢迎程度和内在性质时，儿童更有可能选择稀缺的物品。总之，我们的研究结果表明，研究人员在探究儿童对资源的评估时，应该考虑资源可获取性是如何被设定的。