The Influence of Variety and Scarcity on Children's Decision Making

Children"s Decision Making;Psychology;Social Sciences;Psychology

Echelbarger, MargaretWellman, Henry M ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Children";    s Decision Making;    Psychology;    Social Sciences;    Psychology;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/143990/echelbar_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

What basic cues are available from a young age to determine item value? How do these cues influence evaluative decisions about items (including how to distribute them to others)? The work described in this dissertation begins to address these questions, in a series of seven studies with 943 child and adult participants. In Chapter 2, I report three studies testing whether children (4-12 years) and adults show a direct motivation to select scarce and varied sets of items (i.e., select items for the sake of obtaining something scarce and/or something varied). In this series of studies, participants saw sets of novel items and selected one (Scarcity task) or two (Variety task) that they would like for themselves and/or someone else; no additional information beyond relative availability was provided. Results revealed a clear, early-emerging preference for variety. In contrast, no clear preference for scarce items was observed, suggesting that a preference for scarce items is acquired later and/or contextually-dependent. This latter finding is particularly informative given an oft-made assumption that scarcity increases item value.In Chapter 3, I report four studies designed to reveal the mechanisms underlying a variety preference. In Study 4, I tested whether children (6-9 years) and adults valued varied sets more than non-varied sets monetarily, which would suggest that a preference for variety is rooted in the added value it confers. Results revealed that participants indeed placed a higher value on varied compared to non-varied sets. However, results from Study 5 with children (6-9 years) and adults suggest that the added value assigned to variety is not due to variety per se, but likely to the diminished utility of additional units of the same item in non-varied sets (i.e., additional units of an item are less valuable than the previous). In Studies 6 and 7, I tested whether children (4-9 years) and adults would forego an additional unit of a preferred item in order to obtain a varied set of foods (e.g., if carrots are preferred to broccoli, will a participant forego a second carrot to select broccoli and thus obtain a varied set of foods?). Results revealed that in the absence of a preference for one food over another, participants selected varied food sets more than non-varied food sets, thus conceptually replicating results from Studies 1-3. In contrast, when one food item was preferred over another, participants did not preferentially select varied food sets. Together, these results suggest that a preference for an individual item can override a preference for variety.Overall, these seven studies shed light on how children 4-12 years determine item value using two basic cues, scarcity and variety, and inform our understanding of the strength and limits of a variety preference in childhood. More generally, results from the present work demonstrate that young children systematically use variety as a cue to value, which has implications for our understanding of children as consumers more broadly.