ABSTRACT
By age 3, children track a speaker's record of past accuracy and use it as a cue to current reliability. Two experiments (N=95 children) explored whether preschoolers' judgements about, and trust in, the accuracy of a previously reliable informant extend to other members of the informant's group. In Experiment 1, both 3- and 4-year-olds consistently judged an animated character who was associated with a previously accurate speaker more likely to be correct than a character associated with a previously inaccurate speaker, despite possessing no information about these characters' individual records of reliability. They continued to show this preference one week later. Experiment 2 presented 4- and 5-year-olds with a related task using videos of human actors. Both showed preferences for members of previously accurate speakers' groups on a common measure of epistemic trust. This result suggests that by at least age 4, children's trust in speaker testimony spreads to members of a previously accurate speaker's group.
Subject(s)
Child Development , Judgment/physiology , Speech , Trust/psychology , Age Factors , Child, Preschool , Female , Follow-Up Studies , Humans , Male , Recognition, Psychology/physiology , Reproducibility of ResultsABSTRACT
Because much of what children learn extends beyond their first-hand experience, they are reliant upon the testimony of others to acquire information about aspects of the world they have not experienced directly. Here we asked whether testimony alone would be sufficient to induce cognitive biases in knowledge attribution that have been observed when children acquire information through direct observation. A total of 80 three- and four-year-old children were tested on a "curse of knowledge" task to assess their inability to override their own knowledge when asked to assess the knowledge of a nave other. In the present study, we tested children's ability to override knowledge gained through testimony rather than knowledge gained through visual experience. Testimony alone was sufficient to induce the curse of knowledge in three- and four-year-olds. Knowledge obtained through the testimony of others is apparently subject to some of the same cognitive biases that are present when children learn through observation.
