The Impact of Probability Judgments on Reasoning about Multiple Possibilities

HOROBIN, KAREN, and ACREDOLO, CURT. The Impact of Probability Judgments on Reasoning about Multiple Possibilities. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1989, 60, 183-200. When confronted with indeterminate problems, young children tend to select only 1 of the possible alternatives. The cause of this inappropriate closure was explored here in 2 studies in which children were administered random mixtures of single-solution and multiple-solution problems. A modified version of Pieraut-Le Bonniec's simple box problem was administered to 7-, 9-, and 12-year-old children, and a version of Acredolo and Horobin's complex relational reasoning task was administered to 9and 12-year-old children. In both studies, children were presented with the problems in both of 2 formats, 1 in which they were to list all possible solutions to each problem from a set of 3 alternatives, and a second in which they were to assign subjective probabilities to each of the 3 alternatives on a 5-point scale. Despite a strong tendency to close on single alternatives, most children correctly assigned nonzero probabilities to each of the possible alternatives. Furthermore, the tendency to acknowledge more than 1 alternative as possible correlated reliably with the tendency to assign equal as opposed to unequal probabilities to the possible alternatives. These results support the hypothesis that 1 major cause of inappropriate closure among young children is the confusion of possibility with probability.