Young children prefer to learn from and befriend strivers rather than endowed individuals

Do children reason about the unequal means to success when making future learning decisions? Here we show that children preferred to learn from a striver than from an endowed informant. In Study 1 (N = 100, Mage = 7.58, 45 girls), children compared between a striver and an endowed informant who achieved the same outcome when making future learning decisions.

In Study 2 (N = 120, Mage = 7.30, 65 girls), they compared between informants who achieved different outcomes when making future learning and interpersonal decisions. With increasing age, children attributed more competence and preferred to learn from the striver over the endowed informant (Study 1). Children’s preference to learn from the striver was replicated in Study 2 even when the informants’ outcomes differed in success, with this pattern extending to their preference from whom to seek future information and their interpersonal choices.

Moreover, children referenced both epistemic cues (e.g., “she knows more”) and effort (e.g., “because she worked hard”) to explain their choices. Taken together, children assign epistemic value to effort, and view effort as an indicator of future informant reliability. Broadly, our findings demonstrate that children’s learning and interpersonal preferences are not solely based on successful outcomes, but also the process through which that success is attained.

The authors gratefully acknowledge research assistants Annaliese R. Bonassar, and Meera Kalhan for their support with data collection and transcriptions, as well as Caroline Bird and Chandler Bird for their help with the preparation of study materials. Finally, the authors extend their appreciation to the children and parents whose participation made this research possible.

Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA Correspondence to Kathleen H. The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.