Poster #26 - Children reassess an informant’s misleading claim in the light of later empirical evidence

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

When learning about the world, children gather information from firsthand observation and from other people. The information gained from these different sources may sometimes converge, but at other times it may conflict. When it conflicts, children must engage in a weighing process and determine which source to trust.

Although children have a strong bias to trust an informant’s testimony as a reliable source of information, children around 4-5 years of age show an emerging ability to engage in prospective revisions of trust and disregard an informant’s claim when it conflicts with their prior knowledge (Koenig & Harris, 2005; Koenig et al., 2004). However, an unexplored issue is whether children are able to engage in similar weighing decisions retrospectively, i.e., whether they are able to revise a prior decision to trust an informant’s claim when this conflicts with physical evidence acquired more recently. It is plausible that such weighing processes are impacted by the relative recency with which information was acquired from either source. Providing children with a testimonial claim prior to their acquisition of first-hand data may increase their ability to revise their trust retrospectively, and potentially at an earlier age than has been shown for prospective revision.

In the current study, we presented preschool children (N = 107; M age = 47.59 months, range = 34-60 months) with a task in which they first received verbal information about how a music box functioned, and then later acquired physical evidence that either converged or conflicted with this verbal information – effectively portraying the informant as reliable or unreliable, respectively (see Figure 1 for an illustration of the task procedure). When asked by a second experimenter to indicate how the music box worked, the majority of children exposed to the unreliable informant shifted from relying on knowledge gained through the informant’s testimony to relying on knowledge gained from physical evidence (75%), a shift that was significantly greater than that observed among children in the reliable condition (12%) (X2(1, 107) = 31.96, p < .001) (see Figure 2 for details). Thus, children in the unreliable condition made a retrospective decision to mistrust the informant’s prior claim and to favor the more recently acquired physical information instead.

This finding shows that children are not only able to make prospective, but also retrospective revisions of trust, and that they are able to do so at a younger age than is typically found for revisions of prospective trust.

Authors

• Tone Kristine Hermansen, NUBU
  Presenting Author

• Samuel Ronfard, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Paul Harris, Harvard Graduate School of Education
  Non-Presenting Author

• Francisco Pons, Oslo University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Imac Maria Zambrana, University of Oslo
  Non-Presenting Author