(credit: David Goehring)

According to a new study, toddlers may actually have some logic to their apparent dietary madness—at least a little logic, that is. By watching toddlers react to people’s food preferences, researchers found that the little ankle-biters seem to make generalizations about good eats and who will like them based on social identities. Toddlers expected people in the same social groups to like the same foods and appeared puzzled if that wasn’t the case. But if one person expressed a dislike for a food first, toddlers seemed to expect that everyone would follow suit regardless of social identities.

The findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that toddlers soak up social information about food choices and may be particularly sensitive to any signal that a food is bad or perhaps dangerous. Though more study into toddlers’ gut feelings on foods are necessary, the authors speculate that campaigns to improve kids’ diets may be better served by including social aspects of eating rather than just nutrition information.