Beyond Sameness: Children use similarity to infer friendship

Abstract

One way people infer social affiliations is by attending to shared interests. Past studies revealed that children use identical preferences to infer friendship. However, sharing interests does not always come down to having identical preferences. We investigated whether children see similar preferences as suggestive of friendships. In four experiments, 4-7-year-old children (N = 442, 51% female, 49% male, 0.2% not stated) judged whether pairs of characters were friends. The characters had similar interests in some trials and dissimilar ones in others. In Experiment 1, 5-7-year-olds were more likely to think that the characters were friends if they had similar preferences rather than dissimilar ones, but 4-year-olds were not. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated this finding, while showing that children’s judgments did not depend on the number of similar kinds of things that the characters liked or the amount of evidence for their preferences. Experiment 4 showed that children’s use of similarity depended on similarity per se and did not reduce to inferences about identical preferences. Together, these findings reveal that from age 5, children see similar preferences as suggestive of friendships.