How Popular Media Characters Influence Children’s Object Choices

Children struggle with weighing relevant and irrelevant information when making purchasing decisions about products. Advertisers often take advantage of this weakness, as product marketing strategies include popular cartoon characters specifically to sway children’s preferences. This strategy is so effective, children prefer damaged objects with characters on them over undamaged objects bearing no character (Danovitch & Mills, 2014; 2017). One element that was not examined in previous research is context regarding the intended purpose of the objects, rather only their preference was explored. Thus, children may have felt they were making a subjective choice with little or no practical consequences, and therefore gave greater weight to their personal aesthetic preferences. This study investigated whether children’s choice in this situation related to inhibitory control, and whether children would change their object choice if forced to directly consider object functionality. Across six trials, three-to-four year-olds (N = 84) chose their preference for a damaged object bearing a familiar character or an undamaged version of the same object bearing no character (preference trials). Next, children were asked to move several items across the room, using one of two buckets from the last trial (utility trials). Results showed that children preferred damaged objects with characters over plain, undamaged objects 53% of the time. On utility trials, children picked the damaged objects with the character over the undamaged object only 33% of the time. This suggests children may value the objects’ utility over the character’s presence in some contexts. Children’s choices on both preference and utility trials were not impacted by their performance on the Day-Night inhibitory control task, suggesting that children are not making an impulsive decision. The results from the current study suggest that children ages three-to-four are capable of weighing context specific information regarding objects.