Two experiments investigated children's implicit and explicit differentiation between beliefs about matters of fact and matters of opinion. In Experiment 1, 8-to 9-year-olds' (n ϭ 88) explicit understanding of the subjectivity of opinions was found to be limited, but their conformity to others' judgments on a matter of opinion was considerably lower than their conformity to others' views regarding an ambiguous fact. In Experiment 2, children aged 6, 8, or 10 years (n ϭ 81) were asked to make judgments either about ambiguous matters of fact or about matters of opinion and then heard an opposing judgment from an expert. All age groups conformed to the opposing judgments on factual matters more than they did to the experts' views on matters of opinion. However, only the oldest children explicitly recognized that opinions are subjective and cannot be "wrong." Implications of these results for models of children's reasoning about epistemic states are discussed.

Previous research indicates gossip is a social bonding system that is use to establish shared acquaintances and/ or attitudes, to punish group norm violators, or for coercion via invoking fear of gossipmongers. However, no empirical work explores directly the relationship between gossip about freeloaders leading to improved cooperation in recipients. Thus, we predicted that the sharing of negative gossip about the freeloading behavior of a third party will lead to higher levels of cooperation. Using levels of cooperation in a prisoner's dilemma game as a proxy to measure social bonding, we compared cooperation levels of 60 female respondents who met with a confederate randomly assigned to one of three conditions. They either (1) did not talk or were exposed to (2) negative reputation gossip or (3) self-disclosed negative reputation information. Results show that, even after controlling for a list of potential confounding factors, cooperation levels are high in both the control and self-disclosure condition and are significantly lower in the gossip condition. We suggest that gossip may spark initial relations, yet is insufficient to ignite a social bond sustained by cooperative action among complete strangers.

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