Children's working understanding of knowledge sources: Confidence in knowledge gained from testimony

Abstract

In three experiments, children aged between 3 and 5 years (N = 38, 52, 94; mean ages 3-7 to 5-2) indicated their confidence in their knowledge of the identity of a hidden toy. With the exception of some 3-year-olds, children revealed working understanding of their knowledge source by showing high confidence when they had seen or felt the toy, and lower confidence when they had been told its identity by an apparently well-informed speaker. Correct explicit source reports were not necessary for children to show relative uncertainty when the speaker subsequently doubted the adequacy of his access to the toy. After a 2-min delay, 3-4-year-olds, unlike 4-5-year-olds, failed to see the implications of the speaker's doubt about his access.

To Trust or not to Trust? Children’s Social Epistemology

“…Once again, the findings reported here show that children «are well equipped to benefit from what other people tell them» (Robinson et al 2008b). When confronted with situations in which they do not possess any prior knowledge of their own, they are able (at least by 4 years of age) to choose appropriately between two sources that have previously expressed different levels of reliability.…”

What children know about the source of their knowledge without reporting it as the source

“…Children who understood how they got to know the toy's identity, should accept that it could be the other toy when they had relied on the Experimenter's suggestion, but deny that it could be when they had themselves felt the toy. Robinson et al (2006) found that children aged 3-to 4-years showed that pattern of responses. For example in Robinson et al (2006) Experiment 4, 81 % said "No" it could not be the other toy on both of two trials following the speaker's doubt about his access when they had themselves had informative access, whereas only 40% said "No" on both of two trials when they had relied on the speaker's suggestion, and the remainder accepted at least once that it could be the other toy.…”

“…Robinson et al (2006) found that children aged 3-to 4-years showed that pattern of responses. For example in Robinson et al (2006) Experiment 4, 81 % said "No" it could not be the other toy on both of two trials following the speaker's doubt about his access when they had themselves had informative access, whereas only 40% said "No" on both of two trials when they had relied on the speaker's suggestion, and the remainder accepted at least once that it could be the other toy. Children responded no differently whether it was a puppet, rather than the Experimenter, who felt the toy in the tunnel and expressed doubt about his access: Children attended to the speaker role rather than to the Experimenter as an individual.…”

“…The Experimenter's expression of doubt about his access had implications for the accuracy of the child's belief about the toy's identity when the child had relied on the Experimenter's suggestion. In contrast it was irrelevant when the child herself had had informative access (Robinson, Haigh & Nurmsoo, 2006).…”

“…We again asked children to report explicitly how they knew the hidden toy's identity in a version of the tunnel game used in Experiments 1 and 2, but this time we compared accuracy of children's answers with their working understanding of the source of their knowledge. We assessed this with a procedure devised by Robinson, Haigh and Nurmsoo (2006), to find out whether or not children reasoned along the lines of: "I believed what you told me because I thought you were wellinformed. If after all you were not well-informed then my belief could be false.…”