Young children can infer information preferences from goals and recommend appropriate sources to others.

As adults, we intuitively understand how others' goals influence their information-seeking preferences. For example, you might recommend a dense book full of mechanistic details to someone trying to learn about a topic in-depth, but a more lighthearted book filled with surprising stories to someone seeking entertainment. Moreover, you might do this with confidence despite knowing few details about either book. Even though we offer or receive such recommendations frequently as adults, we know little about how the ability to evaluate and recommend information sources to others develops. Two studies examined how children (6-9 years, Eastern U.S. residents, n = 311) and adults (U.S. residents, n = 180) select mechanistic and entertaining information sources for others depending on their goals. Participants recommended books containing mechanistic information to agents who wanted to learn and entertaining information to agents who wanted to have fun. In contrast to adults who strongly favored entertaining books, children recommended both kinds of books equally to a generally curious agent. These results suggest children can infer others' information-seeking preferences based on their goals and recommend appropriate information sources to satisfy those goals despite possessing little topical knowledge themselves. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

No guts, no glory: underestimating the benefits of providing children with mechanistic details.

Previous research shows that children effectively extract and utilize causal information, yet we find that adults doubt children's ability to understand complex mechanisms. Since adults themselves struggle to explain how everyday objects work, why expect more from children? Although remembering details may prove difficult, we argue that exposure to mechanism benefits children via the formation of abstract causal knowledge that supports epistemic evaluation. We tested 240 6-9 year-olds' memory for concrete details and the ability to distinguish expertise before, immediately after, or a week after viewing a video about how combustion engines work. By around age 8, children who saw the video remembered mechanistic details and were better able to detect car-engine experts. Beyond detailed knowledge, the current results suggest that children also acquired an abstracted sense of how systems work that can facilitate epistemic reasoning.

The neural bases of argumentative reasoning.

Most reasoning tasks used in behavioral and neuroimaging studies are abstract, triggering slow, effortful processes. By contrast, most of everyday life reasoning is fast and effortless, as when we exchange arguments in conversation. Recent behavioral studies have shown that reasoning tasks with the same underlying logic can be solved much more easily if they are embedded in an argumentative context. In the present article, we study the neural bases of this type of everyday, argumentative reasoning. Such reasoning is both a social and a metarepresentational process, suggesting it should share some mechanisms, and thus some neural bases, with other social, metarepresentational process such as pragmatics, metacognition, or theory of mind. To isolate the neural bases of argumentative reasoning, we measured fMRI activity of participants who read the same statement presented either as the conclusion of an argument, or as an assertion. We found that conclusions of arguments, compared to assertions, were associated with greater activity in a region of the medial prefrontal cortex that was identified in quantitative meta-analyses of studies on theory of mind. This study shows that it is possible to use more ecologically valid tasks to study the neural bases of reasoning, and that using such tasks might point to different neural bases than those observed with the more abstract and artificial tasks typically used in the neuroscience of reasoning. Specifically, we speculate that reasoning in an argumentative context might rely on mechanisms supporting metarepresentational processes in the medial prefrontal cortex.

Believing What You're Told: Politeness and Scalar Inferences.

The experimental pragmatics literature has extensively investigated the ways in which distinct contextual factors affect the computation of scalar inferences, whose most studied example is the one that allows "Some X-ed" to mean Not all X-ed. Recent studies from Bonnefon et al. (2009, 2011) investigate the effect of politeness on the interpretation of scalar utterances. They argue that when the scalar utterance is face-threatening ("Some people hated your speech") (i) the scalar inference is less likely to be derived, and (ii) the semantic interpretation of "some" (at least some) is arrived at slowly and effortfully. This paper re-evaluates the role of politeness in the computation of scalar inferences by drawing on the distinction between "comprehension" and "epistemic assessment" of communicated information. In two experiments, we test the hypothesis that, in these face-threatening contexts, scalar inferences are largely derived but are less likely to be accepted as true. In line with our predictions, we find that slowdowns in the face-threatening condition are attributable to longer reaction times at the (latter) epistemic assessment stage, but not at the comprehension stage.

Vigilant conservatism in evaluating communicated information.

In the absence of other information, people put more weight on their own opinion than on the opinion of others: they are conservative. Several proximal mechanisms have been suggested to account for this finding. One of these mechanisms is that people cannot access reasons for other people's opinions, but they can access the reasons for their own opinions-whether they are the actual reasons that led them to hold the opinions (rational access to reasons), or post-hoc constructions (biased access to reasons). In four experiments, participants were asked to provide an opinion, and then faced with another participant's opinion and asked if they wanted to revise their initial opinion. Some questions were manipulated so that the advice participants were receiving was in fact their own opinion, while what they thought was their own opinion was in fact not. In all experiments, the participants were consistently biased towards what they thought was their own opinion, showing that conservativeness cannot be explained by rational access to reasons, which should have favored the advice. One experiment revealed that conservativeness was not decreased under time pressure, suggesting that biased access to reasons is an unlikely explanation for conservativeness. The experiments also suggest that repetition plays a role in advice taking, with repeated opinions being granted more weight than non-fluent opinions. Our results are not consistent with any of the established proximal explanations for conservatism. Instead, we suggest an ultimate explanation-vigilant conservatism-that sees conservatism as adaptive since receivers should be wary of senders' interests, as they rarely perfectly converge with theirs.

Argumentation and the diffusion of counter-intuitive beliefs.

Research in cultural evolution has focused on the spread of intuitive or minimally counterintuitive beliefs. However, some very counterintuitive beliefs can also spread successfully, at least in some communities-scientific theories being the most prominent example. We suggest that argumentation could be an important factor in the spread of some very counterintuitive beliefs. A first experiment demonstrates that argumentation enables the spread of the counterintuitive answer to a reasoning problem in large discussion groups, whereas this spread is limited or absent when participants can show their answers to each other but cannot discuss. A series of experiments using the technique of repeated transmission show that, in the case of the counterintuitive belief studied: (a) arguments can help spread this belief without loss; (b) conformist bias does not help spread this belief; and (c) authority or prestige bias play a minimal role in helping spread this belief. Thus, argumentation seems to be necessary and sufficient for the spread of some counterintuitive beliefs. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Selective Laziness of Reasoning.

Reasoning research suggests that people use more stringent criteria when they evaluate others' arguments than when they produce arguments themselves. To demonstrate this "selective laziness," we used a choice blindness manipulation. In two experiments, participants had to produce a series of arguments in response to reasoning problems, and they were then asked to evaluate other people's arguments about the same problems. Unknown to the participants, in one of the trials, they were presented with their own argument as if it was someone else's. Among those participants who accepted the manipulation and thus thought they were evaluating someone else's argument, more than half (56% and 58%) rejected the arguments that were in fact their own. Moreover, participants were more likely to reject their own arguments for invalid than for valid answers. This demonstrates that people are more critical of other people's arguments than of their own, without being overly critical: They are better able to tell valid from invalid arguments when the arguments are someone else's rather than their own.

Arguments, more than confidence, explain the good performance of reasoning groups.

In many intellective tasks groups consistently outperform individuals. One factor is that the individual(s) with the best answer is able to convince the other group members using sound argumentation. Another factor is that the most confident group member imposes her answer whether it is right or wrong. In Experiments 1 and 2, individual participants were given arguments against their answer in intellective tasks. Demonstrating sound argumentative competence, many participants changed their minds to adopt the correct answer, even though the arguments had no confidence markers, and barely any participants changed their minds to adopt an incorrect answer. Confidence could not explain who changed their mind, as the least confident participants were as likely to change their minds as the most confident. In Experiments 3 (adults) and 4 (10-year-olds), participants solved intellective tasks individually and then in groups, before solving transfer problems individually. Demonstrating again sound argumentative competence, participants adopted the correct answer when it was present in the group, and many succeeded in transferring this understanding to novel problems. Moreover, the group member with the right answer nearly always managed to convince the group even when she was not the most confident. These results show that argument quality can overcome confidence among the factors influencing the discussion of intellective tasks. Explanations for apparent exceptions are discussed.