Children's developing ability to adjust their beliefs reasonably in light of disagreement

Abstract

Two preregistered experiments (N = 218) investigated children's developing ability to respond reasonably to disagreement. U.S. children aged 4–9, and adults (50% female, mostly white) formed an initial belief, and were confronted with the belief of a disagreeing other, whose evidence was weaker, stronger than, or equal to participants' evidence. With age, participants were increasingly likely to maintain their initial belief when their own evidence was stronger, adopt the other's belief when their evidence was weaker, and suspend judgment when both had equally strong evidence. Interestingly, 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds only suspended judgment reliably when this was assessed via the search for additional information (Experiment 2). Together, our experiments suggest that the ability to respond reasonably to disagreement develops over the preschool years.

Children use disagreement to infer what happened

“…Children were then presented with a pink object, an orange object, and an object that was somewhat pink and orange and thus more ambiguous with respect to its color label. The authors found that children did not choose the ambiguous object above chance until around age 9 to 10, aligning with prior studies that it is not until later in childhood that children recognize disagreement as a cue to ambiguity (Foushee & Srinivasan, 2017;Langenhoff et al, 2023).…”

“…For example, children observed speakers disagree about whether an object was "tall" or "not tall," which could be accounted for by the fact that the speakers had observed different object distributions (i.e., one speaker had only observed short versions of the object, while the other had only observed tall versions). Similar to Langenhoff et al (2023), it was not until around age 8 to 9 that children started to acknowledge that both speakers could be right.…”

“…One study examined if children ages 4 to 9 can suspend judgment when they and another speaker have equally strong evidence for different claims (Langenhoff, Engelmann, & Srinivasan, 2023). The authors found it is not until age 7 to 9 that children explicitly recognize they should suspend judgment and seek more information.…”

“…Studies thus far suggest that children's tendency to integrate disagreeing perspectives develops slowly across childhood. One shared feature of these prior studies is that they focus on disagreements about the properties of objects (Amemiya et al, 2021;Foushee & Srinivasan, 2017;Langenhoff et al, 2023). In the current research, we examine disagreement in the social domain for two reasons.…”

“…We examined children's developing ability to infer ambiguous utterances from disagreement. Given that children may not have the necessary skills to make this inference until age 7 to 8 Carpendale & Chandler, 1996;Langenhoff et al, 2023) or potentially as late as age 10 (Amemiya et al, 2021), we included children ages 7 to 11 years old. Focusing on a slightly older age range also allowed us to better examine the mechanisms that underlie how children successfully infer ambiguity from disagreement.…”