Reasoning About Epistemic Processes: Children’s Understanding of how Knowledge is Acquired, Transmitted and Socially Constructed

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

From childhood, humans navigate a rich social world: evaluating rumors, judging absent informants, and learning from oral histories. While even young children consider whether their direct informants are knowledgeable and trustworthy, it is less clear how children navigate these more complex epistemic problems. This symposium presents new work showing how children’s epistemic evaluations are informed by their reasoning about how knowledge is acquired (Paper 1), transmitted (Papers 2-3), and constructed (Paper 4).

Paper 1 investigates the foundations of human epistemic reasoning, finding that from the first year of life, infants realize that knowledge can be gained not only via direct perceptual access, but also via inference. Paper 2 investigates how preschoolers evaluate text and audio testimony, finding that by age four, children evaluate recorded testimony by considering both the originator’s knowledge state, and the method of transmission—expecting recorded information to be more reliable, all else equal. Paper 3 investigates how preschoolers evaluate repeated testimony, finding that by age six, children trace widely-repeated claims back to their source when deciding what to believe. Finally, Paper 4 investigates how school-aged children integrate social evaluation with epistemic reasoning, finding that by age 7, children prefer to trust a consensus arising from a culturally-diverse (vs. homogenous) group.

Together, this symposium begins to map out how children’s naïve epistemology intersects with their understanding of the social world at different developmental stages. Our work highlights a need—and provides a starting point—for future research to investigate how children navigate the everyday complexities of our epistemic world.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Rosie Aboody, Harvard University

• Ian L. Chandler-Campbell, University of Texas at Dallas

Individual Presentations

• Infants in the First Year of Life Attribute Inference-Based Knowledge to Others - Presenting Author: Fransisca Ting, University of Toronto; Lin Bian, University of Chicago; Renee Baillargeon, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• A Matter of Record: Children’s Evaluation of Knowledge Transmission for Text- and Audio-Based Knowledge Artifacts - Presenting Author: Ian L. Chandler-Campbell, University of Texas at Dallas; Maliki E. Ghossainy, Boston University; Kathleen H. Corriveau, Boston University

• To Evaluate Testimony, Children Track Where it Originated, and What Others Believe About its Source - Presenting Author: Rosie Aboody, Harvard University; Sami Yousif, Yale University; Sehrang Joo, Yale University; Mark Sheskin, Minerva University; Frank C Keil, Yale University

• More Than Just Agreement: Children’s Understanding That the Power of Consensus Stems From Group Composition - Karen Carmel Levush, University of Maryland, College Park; Jenna Alton, University of Maryland - College Park; Presenting Author: Lucas Payne Butler, University of Maryland - College Park