Children expect national group membership to guide food choice

Children have early-developing expectations that people from their culture will eat familiar foods (DeJesus et al., 2019). If this is due to children truly understanding that food is cultural, they should also have expectations about what people from other cultures eat: unfamiliar foods. Across two studies, we asked 4- to 9-year-old children (N = 219; M_age = 6.90 years) to sort familiar foods, unfamiliar foods, and disgust elicitors based on who they believed ate the item: people from their national ingroup, people from a national outgroup, both, or neither. We also measured children's own food preferences and ingroup bias. Both studies provided evidence that children expected ingroup members to eat familiar foods and expected outgroup members to eat unfamiliar foods. Interestingly, children's cultural expectations about food may also be linked to their own food preferences and bias. Children with stronger personal preferences for familiar foods over unfamiliar foods were more likely to think that only people from their ingroup would eat those foods, and children with more bias against a national outgroup were less likely to expect outgroup members to eat familiar foods. These results demonstrate that children do have a cultural understanding of food choice and that their personal experiences and preferences linked to their social expectations.