Children’s Selective Trust: Understanding Evidential Reasons, Discovering Interpersonal Reasons

• In Event: 1-086 - Cognitive Mechanisms of Selective Learning

Integrative Statement

Empirical work on testimonial learning has largely focused on the development of epistemic trust, or children’s ability to identify and selectively learn from credible sources of information. This particular focus treats testimony as a form of ordinary inductive evidence, and tends to encourage a risk-assessment picture of testimonial learning while shielding from view the collaborative social dimensions of testimonial transactions.

In this talk, we propose two distinct mechanisms that guide children’s decision to trust: an epistemic appraisal of the evidence and an interpersonal view of another person and her communication. The evidential view involves monitoring the speaker’s credibility of being a good source of information. The interpersonal view treats communication as a cooperative effort, and decisions to trust are voluntary commitments. We are interested in identifying the interpersonal reasons that child listeners are given to believe what they are told, and in discovering the ways in which interpersonal reasons for belief can be distinguished from other kinds of reasons for belief.

By appreciating the more complex terrain of children's testimonial learning, we will present recent evidence in our lab focusing on children’s interpersonal expectations and standards for others during testimonial exchanges. These studies examine children’s responsiveness to interpersonal cues present in simple speech acts of telling, the speaker’s record of keeping her commitments, and whether the testimony is offered in contexts of direct address.

In one study, 3- to 6-year-olds (N = 97) encountered speakers who presented epistemic reasons to believe (Tellings) in contrast to a speaker who presented practical incentives to believe (condition 1: Requests, condition 2: Material offers). We measured children’s attributions of epistemic credit (“Who knows more?”) and non-epistemic credit (“Who would you like to share with?”) to both speakers, as well as rates of endorsement and memory for their claims. Overall, there were more Teller Credit Givers than Non-Teller Credit Givers or Switchers (2 (2) = 18.701, p < .0001; see Table 1). This suggests that children appreciate the distinction between tellings – which offer interpersonal reasons to believe something – and practical reasons for belief.
In a second study, 50 4-year-olds were randomly assigned to a Child-Directed condition, or an Overheard condition. Participants gave baseline classification responses for 4 hybrid animals (e.g., “squirrel,” “rabbit”). In the Child-Directed condition, an experimenter offered to tell the child about the animals, with labels that were in conflict with children’s baseline responses. In the overheard condition, children overheard a speaker use conflicting labels to a third party over the phone. At test, children remembered the claims across conditions equally well. Interestingly, we found that children deferred to the speaker’s testimony and changed their beliefs more often in the Child-Directed than the Overheard condition. Children were also significantly more likely to engage in spontaneous verbal protest in the Child-Directed than the Overheard condition.

In summary, we argue that aside from evidential reasons to trust, interpersonal reasons also play an indispensable part in testimonial learning. We will discuss ways in which children may treat testimonial transactions as implicating distinctively interpersonal commitments and responsibilities.

Authors

• Pearl Han Li, Institute of Child Development
  Presenting Author

• Annelise Pesch, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota
  Non-Presenting Author

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