Easy or difficult? Children's understanding of how supply and demand affect goal completion.

Three experiments examined children's understanding of how supply and demand affect the difficulty of completing goals. Participants were 368 predominantly White Canadians (52% female, 48% male) tested in 2017-2022. In Experiment 1, 3-year-olds recognized that obtaining resources is easier where supply exceeds demand than where demand exceeds supply. However, in Experiment 2, 3-year-olds were insensitive to supply and demand when comparing situations where demand exceeded supply to a greater or lesser degree. Finally, Experiment 3 revealed a developmental lag in 3- to 7-year-olds' understanding of how supply and demand affects goal completion: Children succeeded when contrasting a surplus and a shortage of supply relative to demand at 4;2. But they only succeeded when contrasting degrees of greater supply than demand at 5;10.

Young children use supply and demand to infer desirability.

In 4 experiments, we show that young children (total N = 290) use information about supply and demand to infer the desirability of resources. In each experiment, children saw scenarios about sandwiches from different shops, which varied in supply (number of sandwiches produced for the day) and demand (number of customers attracted). In Experiments 1 and 2, 5- to 6-year-olds gave higher desirability ratings for sandwiches from shops with greater than lesser demand when supply was held constant. In Experiment 3, 5- to 7-year-olds gave higher desirability ratings for sandwiches from shops with less than more supply when demand was held constant. Finally, in Experiment 4, 5- to 6-year-olds were more likely to judge that sandwiches came from a good shop (rather than from a bad one) when demand exceeded supply than when supply exceeded demand. Together, the findings reveal a way that children can infer how desirable resources are, without needing to incur the costs that would normally be required to obtain and sample the resources themselves. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

On the prospect of knowing: Providing solutions can reduce persistence.

Our willingness to persist in problem solving is often held up as a critical component in being successful. Allied against this ability, however, are a number of situational factors that undermine our persistence. In the present investigation, the authors examine 1 such factor-knowing that the answers to a problem are easily accessible. Does having answers to a problem available reduce our willingness to persist in solving it ourselves? Across 4 experiments, participants (university students from a large Canadian University) solved multisolution anagrams and were either provided the answers after giving up (and knew they would receive the answers) or not. Results demonstrated that individuals persisted for less time in the former condition. In addition, participants did not seem to be aware of the effect that answers had on their decisions to quit. Implications for our understanding of the role that access to answers has on persistence across a number of domains (e.g., education, Internet) are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Young children's understanding of the limits and benefits of group ownership.

Group ownership is ubiquitous-property is owned by countries, corporations, families, and clubs. However, people cannot understand group ownership by simply relying on their conceptions of ownership by individuals, as group ownership is subject to complexities that do not arise when property is individually owned. We report 6 experiments investigating whether children ages 3 to 6 (N = 540) understand group ownership. In Experiments 1 and 2 children were asked who different objects belong to, and they appropriately judged that certain objects are more likely to belong to a group than to individual people. Experiments 3 and 4 investigated whether children understand the limits of group ownership. Children saw vignettes where agents modified or depleted property. Children ages 3 and older understood that individual members of a group should not deplete group-owned property, and children ages 5 and 6 understood that individual members should not modify group-owned property. Finally, Experiments 5 and 6 investigated whether children understand the benefits of group ownership. Children ages 5 and 6 judged that it is more acceptable for a group member to take group property than for a nonmember to do this, and children ages 4 to 6 judged that group members can take more group resources than can nonmembers. Together, these results are informative about how children conceive of group ownership rights, and about children's conceptions of groups. (PsycINFO Database Record