Abstract
The present study tested how preschoolers weigh two important cues to a person’s credibility, namely prior accuracy and confidence, when deciding what to learn and believe. Four- and 5-year-olds (N = 96) preferred to believe information provided by a confident rather than hesitant individual; however, when confidence conflicted with accuracy, preschoolers increasingly favored information from the previously accurate but hesitant individual as they aged. These findings reveal an important developmental progression in how children use others’ confidence and prior accuracy to shape what they learn and provide a window into children’s developing social cognition, scepticism, and critical thinking.
Highlights
Young children have a lot to learn about the world around them
Planned t-tests revealed that preschoolers were overall more likely than chance to trust the confident individual in the Confidence Only condition (M = 2.35 trials or 58.8%; t(47) = 2.19, p = .033, d = .31), consistent with previous research
We demonstrated that preschool children are sensitive to the confidence of others when deciding what to believe; importantly, with increasing age, they become more likely to favor the information provided by a hesitant individual who has demonstrated greater prior accuracy
Summary
Young children have a lot to learn about the world around them. Much of this information must be learned from others because some information is impossible to learn without social input (e.g., words are arbitrary social conventions); other information is impractical, inefficient, or extremely difficult to learn on one’s own (e.g., the location of one’s kidneys or distance between two planets); and still other information is too dangerous to learn on one’s own (e.g., what animals are safe to touch). A plethora of recent studies have demonstrated that toddlers and preschool children prefer to learn from previously accurate rather than previously inaccurate individuals [5,6,7,8,9,10]. Another cue that children can use to evaluate an individual’s knowledge is the level of confidence or certainty they express when providing information. Children as young as age 2 are attentive to nonverbal markers of confidence and uncertainty, being more likely to imitate someone’s actions if that person appeared confident in her body language rather than uncertain [14,15]
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