How Preschoolers Use Statistics

Original source: SimoleonSense.com .

Introduction (Via Psych Science)

Children are natural psychologists. By the time they’re in preschool, they understand that other people have desires, preferences, beliefs, and emotions. But, exactly how they learn this isn’t clear. A new study published in Psychological Science finds that children figure out another person’s preferences by using a topic you’d think they wouldn’t encounter until college: statistics.

In one experiment described in the study, 3 and 4 year olds watched a puppet named “Squirrel” remove five toys of the same type (blue foam flowers) from a container full of toys and happily play with them. One-third of the children were presented with a container filled with only blue flowers, another third of the children saw a container with 50 percent blue flowers (the other half were red circles) and a final group had only 18 percent blue flowers. Later on, children were asked to give Squirrel a toy that he likes. The children were more likely to give Squirrel the blue flowers if he had selected them out of A container that had other toys in it.

Even more striking, the proportion of other toys mattered as well; the kids gave Squirrel the blue flowers more when the container included only 18 percent blue flowers, and slightly less often when the container had 50 percent blue flowers. When the container had 100 percent blue flowers, the children gave Squirrel toys at random. The children apparently inferred that the puppet liked blue flowers best if the sample of five toys didn’t match the proportion of toys in the population (the container), a statistical phenomenon known as non-random sampling.

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