Evidential diversity and premise probability in young children’s inductive judgment1

A familiar adage in the philosophy of science is that general hypotheses are better supported by varied evidence than by uniform evidence. Several studies suggest that young children do not respect this principle, and thus suffer from a defect in their inductive methodology. We argue that the diversity principle does not have the normative status that psychologists attribute to it, and should be replaced by a simple rule of probability. We then report an experiment designed to detect conformity to the latter rule in children’s inductive judgment. Evidential Diversity 1