Children Understand How Adults’ Achievement Goals Drive Actions

Adults often hold different goals for children’s achievement: Sometimes they want a child to learn and develop their skills as much as possible (i.e., a learning goal), while other times they may forego a child’s learning in favor of successful performance (i.e., a performance goal). How do children think these achievement goals influence adults’ child-directed behaviors? Across two preregistered experiments (n = 90 adults; n = 160 5- to 8-year-old children), we found that children systematically predict that an adult would select a more difficult task for a recipient child when the adult held a learning (vs. performance) goal, and when the recipient was more (vs. less) competent. Importantly, we found that this pattern matched adults’ actual task choices, although adults showed more sensitivity to choosing a task that anchors closely to what a child can reasonably learn from or accomplish. These results suggest children can reason about how adult’s achievement goals manifest into observable actions, which may have consequences for children’s own goal orientations and task selections.