Is Testimony a “Double-Edged Sword”? Investigating the developmental origins of epistemic injustice in childhood

• In Event: Knowing Right and Wrong: Intersections Between Sociomoral and Epistemic Reasoning

Abstract

Testimony is an essential tool for learning about the world. While most thought of as a means of sharing information, learning from testimony is also a complex, cooperative process. Unfortunately, this cooperative component also makes testimonial exchanges, and the members who participate in them, vulnerable to harm and destruction. In some cases, breakdowns in testimonial exchange may be warranted (e.g., not trusting information from a previously inaccurate speaker; Mills, 2013). Here, we examine a form of unwarranted testimonial rejection, called epistemic injustice, that results from personal or systematic prejudice on the listener’s end. Importantly, epistemic injustice can cause interpersonal and epistemic harm to the speaker (i.e., denouncing the speaker’s identity as a credible knowledge source) and the broader epistemic community (Fricker, 2007). To better understand this injustice and its consequences, it is important to elucidate children’s ability to detect cases of epistemic harm. While there is empirical evidence regarding how children evaluate other forms of harm (e.g., social exclusion; Rhodes & Chalik, 2013), this study is the first to empirically investigate young children’s understanding that harm can be caused by rejecting someone’s testimony.
Data collection is currently underway for this project. Ultimately, 150 children (4- to 10-year-olds, 75 female, 75 White & 75 BIPOC) will participate (n based on power analysis with α = .05 and power = .85). Participants view four animated videos in which a listener believes the personal anecdotes (e.g., “My neighbor built my project with me this morning”) of one speaker but not the other. The social characteristics of the characters vary based on assignment to one of the following between-subjects conditions: identity, race, or gender. In the identity condition, all characters are race- and gender-matched to the participant. In the race condition, characters vary by race but are all gender-matched to the participant (and vice versa for the gender condition). After each trial, participants answer a series of questions regarding their interpretation of the videos.
Since data collection is ongoing, we conducted preliminary analyses with an initial sub-sample (n = 13, M age = 83.1 months, all female). First, we investigated whether participants believe it is good or bad for a listener to believe in one speaker but not the other, using a scale from (0) very bad to (3) very good. A one-sample Wilcoxon test indicates that participants’ responses (Mdn = 0.5, IQR = .81) are significantly lower from what would be expected for an at-chance distribution (Mdn = 1.5), p < .05. Using the same rating scale (Mdn = 1.5), participants also expected that the scenarios would result in the believed speaker feeling good (Mdn = 2.8, IQR = .5, p < .01) and the non-believed speaker feeling bad (Mdn = 0, IQR = .5, p < .01). These preliminary results demonstrate a promising pattern of young children understanding and negatively evaluating acts of epistemic injustice. Once data collection is complete, a generalized linear mixed-effects model will explore condition, participant race, and participant gender as predictors of children’s harm ratings.

Authors

• Erika DeAngelis, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
  Presenting Author

• Pearl Han Li, Duke Univeristy

• Melissa A. Koenig, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities