Poster #197 - Children’s Selective Information Sharing

• In Event: 2-163 - Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

BACKGROUND: By age 3, children engage in selective learning (e.g., Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2001; Koenig, Clement, & Harris, 2004) – that is, they prefer some information sources over others. However, much less is known about what children do with the information once they have learned it. There is some recent evidence that young children can teach others what they have learned (e.g., Ronfard, Was, & Harris, 2016) and that they can be selective about what they teach (Baer & Friedman, 2018). Here, we examine whether children consider an informant’s prior accuracy when deciding what information to share with a naive listener. Building on prior studies on selective learning, we expected children to preference information from an accurate informant when sharing words. Additionally, we extend prior work by exploring children's information sharing in STEM domains, which are more complex but for which children may have greater tolerance for variability in the accuracy of information they receive.

METHOD: Four- and 5-year-olds (N = 26) were introduced to Zorg, an alien puppet who didn't "know anything about our world" (Gelman et al., 2013), and were told that they would be teaching Zorg some new things. Next children watched 3 pairs of videos featuring an accurate informant and an inaccurate informant making contradictory statements about familiar objects or entities in one of four domains (i.e., physical science, life science, math, and words; see Table 1) and indicated which statement was correct. Children then explicitly judged the accuracy of the informants. Next, children watched 3 pairs of test videos where the same informants made contradictory statements about unfamiliar objects or entities (see Table 1). After each pair of videos, children were asked to share the information with Zorg. This process of 3 history trials, followed by an explicit judgment, and 3 test trials was then repeated for each of the other 3 domains. Domain and informant order were counter-balanced between subjects.

RESULTS: Children correctly identified the accurate statements in 98% of the history trials, with no significant differences across domains. Similarly, children correctly identified the accurate or inaccurate informant 95% of the time. Overall, children were more likely to share information that had been provided by the previously accurate informant (M = 2.33, SD = .52) and there were no significant differences between domains (see Figure 1). Children also shared the accurate informant's response at rates significantly above chance for each domain (all ps < .01).

CONCLUSIONS: When asked to share new information with a naive listener, children showed a strong preference to share information that came from an accurate informant. This was true for novel words, as expected, but impressively this was equally true for novel math and science information. These findings extend prior work by showing that children remain sensitive to the accuracy of a source’s information even in more complex STEM domains and that this sensitivity can lead children to be selective about the type of information they share, when they share it, and with whom they share it.

Authors

• Luci Davila, University of Alabama
  Presenting Author

• Allison Williams, University of Louisville
  Non-Presenting Author

• Judith Danovitch, University of Louisville
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jason Scofield, The University of Alabama
  Non-Presenting Author