Confidence May be Key, but What Else? Preschool- and Young School-age Children's Interpretation of Confidence

• In Event: Who Knows What? Influences on and Consequences of Beliefs about Competence in Children

Abstract

When navigating a world full of novelty, children have the capacity to discern reliable sources of information (i.e., selective social learning). They consider various credibility cues to decipher whether an informant’s testimony is reliable, such as a speaker’s level of pro-sociality (e.g., Corriveau & Harris, 2011) and history of accuracy (e.g., Harris, Koenig, Corriveau, & Jaswal, 2018). It has also been widely demonstrated that children prefer to learn from a confident, rather than hesitant, informant (e.g., Birch, Akmal & Frampton, 2010). However, little is known about how children interpret confidence cues: Is certainty an indicator of informant knowledge, and thus an epistemic cue? Are confident speakers more pro-social? Does uncertainty indicate that a speaker lacks talents?

The current studies explore how preschool and school-aged children interpret confidence cues, and which sorts of informant attributions they make about confident speakers. In Study 1, 41 preschoolers (3-5 year olds) and school-aged children (6-8 year olds) viewed videos of informants labeling common objects, demonstrating either cues of certainty or uncertainty. Children were then presented with 12 pictures of objects, each paired with a label. Labels were either correct (i.e., matched the picture), incorrect, or novel (i.e., a nonsense word) and children had to identify which informant had written the object label on each card. In the following task, children were presented with 18 statements (i.e., knowledge of words, knowledge of facts, pro-sociality, talents, situation-specific knowledge, and neutral attributions) and were asked which informant (or both or neither) they applied to. Results reveal that children in both age groups attributed more correct labels to the confident informant (Preschool: M= .73, SD= 1.53, t(40)= 3.06, p= .004; School-age: M= 1.27, SD= 2.23, t(40)= 3.65, p= .001). Further, school-aged children, but not preschoolers, attributed more word knowledge to the confident informant (M= .46, SD= 1.31, t(40)= 2.27, p= .028). These findings demonstrate that children, based on their developmental stage, can actively use confidence cues to make informant attributions.

Study 2 compared 4- to 7-year olds (n=29) interpretation of confidence cues to their interpretation of accuracy and benevolence cues. Children were randomly assigned to one of three conditions, in which they viewed videos of two informants acting in conflicting ways (i.e., Accuracy Condition: accurately vs inaccurately, Confidence Condition: confidently vs hesitantly, Benevolence Condition: benevolently vs malevolently). Then, children were asked to make different types of attributions (i.e., knowledge, pro-sociality, talents) about those two informants. Preliminary results indicate that children in the Confidence Condition attributed more knowledge to the confident rather than the hesitant informant (M=3,00, SD=1.00., t(10)=3.317., p=.008), which is consistent with Study 1. However, they did not attribute more knowledge nor more pro-sociality when compared to the other two conditions (Knowledge attributions: F(2,26)=.436, p=651, Social attributions : F(2,26)=1.063, p=.360).

Taken together, these results suggest that children attribute more knowledge to confident, rather than hesitant, informants. However, knowledge attributions are also made in other domains, such as benevolence and accuracy. Further research is necessary to better understand how children interpret confidence, specifically compared to other credibility cues.

Authors

• Sophie Fobert, Université d'Ottawa
  Presenting Author

• Aimie-Lee Juteau, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Patricia E Brosseau-Liard, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author