Varieties of testimony: Children’s selective learning in semantic versus episodic domains

The development of stereotype content: The use of warmth and competence in assessing social groups

“…This asymmetry in the relationship between warmth and competence during early childhood may help to interpret past research showing that children sometimes conflate warmth and competence judgments (Stipek & Tannatt, 1984) and that they seek information more reliably from competent informants than from warm informants (Stephens & Koenig, 2015). In the former case, our data suggest that such crossover influences will be much stronger in one direction, from competence to warmth, than in the other direction, from warmth to competence.…”

“…Most notably, a number of studies show that infants as young as 8 months assess others' competence levels and choose to trust the judgment of the more competent individual (Koenig & Echols, 2003;Tummeltshammer et al, 2014). Moreover, preschoolers use competence information to decide which novel informant is most trustworthy and to judge which is most helpful (Stephens & Koenig, 2015) and, in fact, rely more on competence information than on warmth information to do so (Lane et al, 2013). On a strong version of this account, children would distinguish groups that are high and low in competence but would not distinguish groups on the basis of high versus low warmth.…”

“…Although there is less evidence for the primacy of competence hypothesis compared with the primacy of warmth and primacy of valence hypotheses, we elected to include it because of recent findings suggesting surprising sensitivities to competence (e.g., Stephens & Koenig, 2015). To test these hypotheses, we presented eight social groups (based on groups used in Fiske et al, 2002, adapted for familiarity to children) to 5-and 6-year-old children, 9-and 10-year-old children, and adults.…”

Reasoning about knowledge: Children’s evaluations of generality and verifiability

“…On this possibility, it doesn’t matter how or why you credit knowledge to a speaker, knowledgeable speakers license or promote a general-purpose invitation to learn. However, given the developmental evidence (Brooker & Poulin-Dubois, 2013; Brosseau-Liard & Birch, 2011; Danovitch & Keil, 2004; Fusaro, Corriveau, & Harris, 2011; Henderson, Graham, & Schell, 2015; Koenig & Jaswal, 2011; Kushnir, Vredenburgh, & Schneider, 2013; Sobel & Corriveau, 2008; Stephens & Koenig, 2015), we think it is more likely that children’s learning decisions are more selectively tied to the knowledge that the speaker displays in their behavior or language use. One goal for future research is to better specify the downstream effects of knowledge attributions for a social learner (e.g., to speakers who make general claims, verifiable claims, unusual claims, causal-explanatory claims), and why they might have these effects.…”

Young children's conceptions of knowledge

“…In older children, these representations are more nuanced and robust: reliability is described epistemically (Koenig & Harris, ), represented probabilistically (Pasquini, Corriveau, Koenig, & Harris, ), remembered after delays (Corriveau & Harris, ), and used in further reasoning, such as inference via elimination of alternatives (Birch, Vauthier, & Bloom, ). Preschooler's understanding of an informant's reliability is also tied to their expertise with a particular topic (Sobel & Corriveau, ), which does not necessarily generalize to another topic (Koenig & Jaswal, ; Kushnir, Vredenburgh, & Schneider, ; Stephens & Koenig, ), and they will seek out contextually expert informants who they may not value in other contexts (Lutz & Keil, ; VanderBorght & Jaswal, ). While these seem like epistemic considerations, there are also many other traits that children value in informants, which we might consider less closely related to epistemic justification.…”