Abstract
Recent research has challenged the extended idea that when presented with conflicting information provided by different sources, children, as do adults, make epistemic judgments based on the past accuracy of each source. Instead, individuals may use relatively simple, but adaptive non-epistemic strategies. Here we examined how primary-school children (N = 114) and undergraduate students (N = 57) deal with conflicting information provided by two key sources of information in their day-to-day lives: their teacher and the Internet. In order to study whether the inaccuracy of a source generated a decline in trust, we manipulated this variable between participants: teacher-wrong and Internet-wrong conditions. For this, we first presented two baseline trials, followed by the accuracy manipulation, and finally, two post-test trials. Analyses were performed on group performance as well as on individual performance, to explore the individual patterns of responses. Results revealed that most participants showed no preference for any source during baseline, with no age differences in their overall choices. Crucially, when a given source provided inaccurate information about a familiar issue, most children and adults did not lose trust on this source. We propose tentative explanations for these findings considering potential differences in the participants’ strategies to approach the task, whether or not epistemic.
Highlights
Testimony is essential for humans to learn a vast number of concepts and information about our present and past world
The main aim of this exploratory study was to examine the trust placed by children and adults in information provided by two sources, their teacher and the Internet, and the impact of the sources’accuracy on the participants’ willingness to trust
As in most previous works, we investigated the group performance, analyzing the most frequent choice in the samples, but we were interested in looking at individual performance in order to obtain a deeper understanding of the phenomenon (Guerrero et al, 2017a; Juteau et al, 2019; Cossette et al, 2020)
Summary
Testimony is essential for humans to learn a vast number of concepts and information about our present and past world. The usual findings indicate that preschoolers take into account some characteristics of the informants to selectively decide whom to trust (Harris et al, 2018). If the teacher previously provided blatantly wrong information (e.g., calling a spoon a duck) children tend to decrease their trust in him/her. The past accuracy of the source is among the most influential variables on children’s willingness to trust others’ testimony (Clément et al, 2004; Koenig and Harris, 2007; Pasquini et al, 2007), and from 7 years, they need just a single encounter with an inaccurate informant to use this information to make their trust decisions (Fitneva and Dunfield, 2010)
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