TRANSITIVITY OF PREFERENCE PATTERNS AS SEEN BY PRE-SCHOOL CHILDREN

Forty 5–7-year-old children were asked to predict the choice of a boy or girl between objects A and C, after they had been shown that the boy (girl) preferred A to B and B to C. The results show an almost complete absence of ability to perform the required transitive inference. The children's predictions were heavily influenced by their own preferences ('egocentrism') and by all kinds of irrelevant perceptual features of the situation. Furthermore, the children's own preferences were frequently nontransitive, i.e. of the type A > B, B > C, C > A (> = preferred to). The findings are interpreted within the theoretical framework of Piaget.