Preschoolers' Understanding of Preferences is Modulated by Linguistic Framing

Reasoning about others' preferences is an important aspect of understanding the social world. Although there is some evidence that young children reason appropriately about others' discrepant preferences, there are reasons to suspect this ability remains fragile through the preschool years. In particular, we argue that the way preferences are expressed may tap into humans' lifelong tendency toward naïve realism, the belief that my way of seeing the world is the normative, correct one. We present data demonstrating that tolerance for unconventional opinions increases during the preschool years but remains susceptible to influence by linguistic framing.