Social groups highlight latent structure in the social worldand support inductive inferences about individuals. In thepresent work, we examined children and adults’ intuitionsabout shared preferences within social groups. In Exp.1, 3- to5-year-old children treated preferences as a consistent propertyof social groups; that is, children expected members of a so-cial group to like the same toys that other members have liked.However, they did not treat preferences as diagnostic of socialgroups; they did not expect individuals to belong to a groupthat shares their preferences. By contrast, in Exp.2, adultsreadily treated preferences as both a consistent and diagnos-tic property of social groups. These results suggest that chil-dren’s inferences about social groups are asymmetric: Chil-dren readily infer preferences based on group membership, butnot group membership based on preferences.