Poster #191 - Learning Counter-intuitive Testimony in Direct and Overheard Contexts

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Children grow up surrounded by others, and learn from others by both direct address and observing others have conversations (e.g. Gampe, Liebal, & Tomasello, 2012; Woodward & Shneidman, 2015). However, little is known about children’s reactions to these learning contexts when the information contradicts what children already know. This study is the first to examine whether children were more likely to convert their own beliefs when the testimony was directly communicated to them compared to being overheard. It is also the first to evaluate how much children held the speaker accountable for her previous mistakes in both conditions.

Method: 4-year-old U.S. children (N =50) were randomly assigned to a Child-Directed condition and an Overheard condition. Participants were presented with four hybrid animal pictures (e.g., 75% rabbit features and 25% squirrel features) and were asked to give baseline classification responses (e.g. “Rabbit”). In the Child-Directed condition, a live human speaker offered to tell the child about the animals and used labels that were in conflict with children’s baseline responses. In the Overheard condition, children overheard a speaker tell a third party on the phone, using animal labels that contradicted the child’s previous answers. In the test phase, children were asked to reconcile the conflicts between their baseline answers and testimony in a matching game to win stickers. When the “correct answers” were revealed, children in both conditions found out that the speaker actually provided wrong labels about the animals. For every trial they “lost”, children were asked whether they should take one sticker out of the speaker’s cup or their own cup. Finally, in a reciprocal communication task, children were given the opportunity to share new information about novel objects with the speaker, or keep the information a secret.

Results: In both conditions, children performed equally well in remembering the speaker’s claims . However, children were significantly above chance (2 out of 4 trials) in updating their answers to align with the speaker in the Child-Directed condition (M = 3.12, SD = .881) , t (24) = 6.354, p < .001, but not the Overheard condition (M = 2.28, SD = 1.487), t (24) = .942, p =.356. We also found a significant effect of condition, t (48) = 2.43, p =0. 019, indicating that children were more likely to update their beliefs based on the speaker’s testimony when they were directly addressed compared to when they overheard a speaker talking with somebody else. Children were also significantly more likely to engage in spontaneous verbal protest when hearing the counter-intuitive testimony in the Child-Directed condition (36%) than in the Overheard condition (12%). Nevertheless, children were equally likely to punish the speaker by taking stickers out of her cup, and to withhold new information from the speaker across the two conditions. In summary, children deferred to the speaker’s testimony more often in the Child-Directed condition than the Overheard condition. However, children in both conditions were equally likely to hold the speakers accountable after realizing that the speaker’s answers were incorrect.

Authors

• Melissa A Koenig, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota
  Presenting Author

• Pearl Han Li, Institute of Child Development
  Non-Presenting Author