Partition Dependence in Development: How Groupings of Options Influence Decision Making in Children and Adults

The partitioning of options into arbitrary categories has been shown to influence adults’ decisions when making selections or allocations among those categories; this tendency is called “partition dependence” and is observed to occur across a variety of scenarios. In three selection experiments (N = 299) I asked whether a candy selection task elicits partition dependence in children and adults as reported in a previous adult study (Fox, Ratner, & Lieb, 2005). The physical partitioning of candy across bowls did not influence the selections of adults or children in the task, conflicting with previous findings. In three allocation experiments (N = 159 children and a preliminary N = 60 adults) I tested to see if children and adults exhibit partition dependence in a novel resource allocation task. This novel task of distributing food tokens to zoo animals elicited partition dependence in older children and younger children, with younger children exhibiting a stronger degree of partition dependence. Preliminary adult results suggest that the physical allocation task does not influence adults’ decisions. This thesis questions the scope of partition dependence in physical choices and proposes explanations for the discrepancy between these selection findings and previous selection findings. Importantly, this thesis provides the first evidence of partition dependence in children, suggesting that younger children are more susceptible to partition dependence and laying the groundwork for future developmental investigations into the phenomenon.