Belief revision in a social world: How other people shape children’s ability to revise beliefs

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

From early in development, children form beliefs based on what they see, what they are told, and what they discover. Importantly, like adults, children can update these beliefs when provided with new or contradictory evidence. This symposium demonstrates how children’s beliefs are profoundly shaped and reshaped through interaction with other people, and highlights how children’s belief revision is a dynamic and often socially-driven process.

Paper 1 shows that direct instruction shapes children’s beliefs about possibility: children are more willing to accept the possibility of surprising events when told that similar events have happened in the past, especially when such testimony is accompanied by information about the causal mechanisms that enabled the events. Paper 2 shows that other people shape children’s belief revision indirectly: asking children to consider alternatives—even when those alternatives are irrelevant and non-causal—helps children detect anomalies and, as a result, reduces the amount of evidence they need to update their understanding of a previously learned causal system. Paper 3 shows other people not only shape how much evidence children need to revise their beliefs but also the kind of evidence they seek: children’s exploration of museum exhibits is shaped by the information they receive from other people. Finally, Paper 4 shows that this influence of other people on children’s exploration in the pursuit of belief revision depends on who informs them: children are less likely to believe and thus less likely to investigate a surprising claim provided by an unreliable as opposed to a reliable informant.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Brandon Wade Goulding, University of Winnipeg

• Samuel Ronfard, University of Toronto

Individual Presentations

• Causal information alone does not enable children to revise their beliefs about improbable events - Presenting Author: Brandon Wade Goulding, University of Winnipeg; Non-Presenting Author: Ori Friedman, University of Waterloo

• Counterfactual reasoning facilitates belief revision in preschoolers - Presenting Author: Jae Engle, University of California, San Diego; Non-Presenting Author: Caren M. Walker, University of California - San Diego

• Children’s belief revision during natural exploration in a children’s museum - Presenting Author: David Marc Sobel, Brown University; Non-Presenting Author: Laura Stricker, Brown University; Non-Presenting Author: Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Villanova University

• Accent Matters: Children are less likely to investigate surprising claims provided by non-native speakers - Presenting Author: Samuel Ronfard, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Thomas St. Pierre, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Katherine White, University of Waterloo; Non-Presenting Author: Elizabeth K. Johnson, University of Toronto