Context (archaeology)

Cognitive psychology

Philosophy

Biology

Statistics

Social psychology

Computer science

Essentialism

Paleontology

Psychology

Mathematics

Object (grammar)

Value (mathematics)

Epistemology

Artificial intelligence

Persuasion

Machine learning

Journal of Consumer Psychology

We argue that, contrary to standard views of development, children understand the world in terms of hidden, nonobvious structure. We review research showing that early in childhood, items are not understood strictly in terms of the features that present themselves in the immediate “here‐and‐now,” but rather are thought to have a hidden reality. We illustrate with two related but distinct examples: category essentialism, and attention to object history. We discuss the implications of each of these capacities for how children determine object value. Across a broad range of object types (natural and artifactual, real and virtual, durable and consumable), an item is evaluated very differently, depending on inferred qualities and context. In this way, children's early‐emerging conceptual frameworks influence how objects attain both psychological and monetary value, and may have important implications for which messages children find most persuasive.

Children, Object Value, and Persuasion