Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People tend to avoid wasting resources, but little is known about when this emerges in development. Though young children are often wasteful with food and other items, previous work suggests that children consider waste in other judgments. Here, we examined if children anticipate that others should minimize waste. In two experiments (total N = 195), children chose which of two foods someone should eat (Experiment 1; 3-7-year-olds) or two papers someone should make a snowflake with (Experiment 2; 5-year-olds). One of the options would result in minimal waste (i.e., a small food/paper) while the other would result in greater waste (i.e., a large food/paper). Children did not anticipate that others would choose smaller foods, however, at around five years they predicted that others would choose smaller paper. These findings contribute to our knowledge of the development of waste aversion and may extend our understanding of waste aversion as a form of efficiency.