Children seek out observations that can reveal a partner's generosity

Humans face the adaptive challenge of assessing how much other people value them. Evidence suggests that the human mind is well-equipped for this task: people can rationally estimate, and collect information about, the weight that an interaction partner assigns to their welfare (the partner's welfare-tradeoff ratio). Here we probe the developmental origins of this ability using an information-search task with 6- to 12-year-old children (n=97). Children took part in an economic game where another agent allocated rewards either to themselves or the child. The children could choose which of the agent's decisions they wanted to see. We compared children's choices to the predictions of a normative Bayesian model that maximizes expected information gain about the partner's welfare-tradeoff ratio. We found that children's information-seeking behavior was broadly aligned with the normative model, although they tended to under-weigh prior information when modeling their partner's decision-making. These findings suggest that by middle childhood, children are rational information-seekers in social contexts, strategically gathering data to inform their social judgments.