Selective Social Belief Revision in Young Children

Abstract

Recent research has shown that from early in development, children selectively form new beliefs in response to information supplied by others. However, little is known about the development of selective revision of existing beliefs in response to socially conveyed information. Such selective social belief revison has been extensively studied by social psychologists in the context of advice-taking. Here, we adapted the methods of this research tradition for studying selective advice-taking in young children and adults. Participants solved a perceptual judgment task, received advice, and subsequently made final decisions. The informational access (perceptual quality) of participants and advisor were experimentally manipulated. Adults revised their judgments systematically as a function of both their own

Learning with certainty in childhood

“…An important caveat is that belief revision is not always perfectly rational. Adults and children are unlikely to change their beliefs if held with high confidence, even when conflicting evidence is also presented with high confidence [30,113,114]. This bias can be problematic when a learner is overconfident and unwilling to engage with the conflicting evidence.…”

How children revise their beliefs in light of reasons

“…In Robinson et al (1999), preschoolers guessed the identity of an object hidden in a container. They subsequently revised their beliefs when they received contradicting verbal information from an informed person (who had visual access to the object), but not when they received this information form an ignorant person (who had not seen the object, see also Miosga et al, 2020). Macris and Sobel (2017) asked children to form a hypothesis about which objects are needed to make a machine play music based on probabilistic, inconclusive evidence and then provided children with contradictory evidence (based either on observation or testimony).…”

Young children evaluate and follow others’ arguments when forming and revising beliefs

“…revise their initial beliefs more strongly when the advisor was in a better perceptual situation than they were (Miosga et al, 2020). The new variation between conditions in the present study concerned whether the advisor did or did not use an argument ("I know this because I have seen it") to back up her advice.…”