Children judge others based on their food choices.

Individuals and cultures share some commonalities in food preferences, yet cuisines also differ widely across social groups. Eating is a highly social phenomenon; however, little is known about the judgments children make about other people's food choices. Do children view conventional food choices as normative and consequently negatively evaluate people who make unconventional food choices? In five experiments, 5-year-old children were shown people who ate conventional and unconventional foods, including typical food items paired in unconventional ways.

Early emerging system for reasoning about the social nature of food.

Selecting appropriate foods is a complex and evolutionarily ancient problem, yet past studies have revealed little evidence of adaptations present in infancy that support sophisticated reasoning about perceptual properties of food. We propose that humans have an early-emerging system for reasoning about the social nature of food selection. Specifically, infants' reasoning about food choice is tied to their thinking about agents' intentions and social relationships.

Is it about "pink" or about "girls"? The inherence heuristic across social and nonsocial domains.

The inherence heuristic provides an intriguing and novel explanation for early thought in a variety of domains. Exploring similarities and differences in inherent reasoning across social and nonsocial domains can help us understand the role that inherent thinking plays in the development of human reasoning and the process by which more elaborate essentialist reasoning develops.