Visual access trumps gender in 3- and 4-year-old children’s endorsement of testimony

Terrier, Nathalie; Bernard, Stéphane; Mercier, Hugo; Clément, Fabrice

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2016.02.002

Cited by 31 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…To our knowledge and following a review of the literature, this is the first time that such a sex bias has been observed (see electronic supplementary material, table S1). Previous studies have reported that children prefer to endorse information coming from informants of their own sex [ 49 ], which may eventually result in sex differences when it comes to overimitation in adults: women have indeed been observed to copy more precisely and more rapidly irrelevant tool actions performed by male models than female models [ 50 ]. However, in our study the Serbian children were all tested by female experimenters and showed the same sex bias as the French children (tested by one male experimenter), thus the sex of the model is unlikely to have played a role in our results.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence for a sex effect during overimitation: boys copy irrelevant modelled actions more than girls across cultures

2017

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Children are skilful at acquiring tool-using skills by faithfully copying relevant and irrelevant actions performed by others, but poor at innovating tools to solve problems. Five- to twelve-year-old urban French and rural Serbian children (N = 208) were exposed to a Hook task; a jar containing a reward in a bucket and a pipe cleaner as potential recovering tool material. In both countries, few children under the age of 10 made a hook from the pipe cleaner to retrieve the reward on their own. However, from five onward, the majority of unsuccessful children succeeded after seeing an adult model manufacturing a hook without completing the task. Additionally, a third of the children who observed a similar demonstration including an irrelevant action performed with a second object, a string, replicated this meaningless action. Children's difficulty with innovation and early capacity for overimitation thus do not depend on socio-economic background. Strikingly, we document a sex difference in overimitation across cultures, with boys engaging more in overimitation than girls, a finding that may result from differences regarding explorative tool-related behaviour. This male-biased sex effect sheds new light on our understanding of overimitation, and more generally, on how human tool culture evolved.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence for a sex effect during overimitation: boys copy irrelevant modelled actions more than girls across cultures

2017

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“…Epistemic and social characteristics are both important to children’s strategies for selecting and trusting informants. Moreover, these two types of characteristics also interact with each other (e.g., Terrier, Bernard, Mercier, & Clément, ). For instance, Corriveau and Harris () found that seeing a familiar teacher inaccurately label familiar objects undermined 4‐ to 5‐year‐old preschoolers’ trust in her labels for unfamiliar objects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of epistemic and social characteristics in children’s selective trust: Three meta‐analyses

Wang

Danovitch

2019

Developmental Science

111

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Over the last 15 years, researchers have been increasingly interested in understanding the nature and development of children’s selective trust. Three meta‐analyses were conducted on a total of 51 unique studies (88 experiments) to provide a quantitative overview of 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children’s selective trust in an informant based on the informant’s epistemic or social characteristics, and to examine the relation between age and children’s selective trust decisions. The first and second meta‐analyses found that children displayed medium‐to‐large pooled effects in favor of trusting the informant who was knowledgeable or the informant with positive social characteristics. Moderator analyses revealed that 4‐year‐olds were more likely to endorse knowledgeable informants than 3‐year‐olds. The third meta‐analysis examined cases where two informants simultaneously differed in their epistemic and social characteristics. The results revealed that 3‐year‐old children did not selectively endorse informants who were more knowledgeable but had negative social characteristics over informants who were less knowledgeable but had positive social characteristics. However, 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds consistently prioritized epistemic cues over social characteristics when deciding who to trust. Together, these meta‐analyses suggest that epistemic and social characteristics are both valuable to children when they evaluate the reliability of informants. Moreover, with age, children place greater value on epistemic characteristics when deciding whether to endorse an informant’s testimony. Implications for the development of epistemic trust and the design of studies of children’s selective trust are discussed.

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“…On the other hand, we know that dominance plays a crucial role in young children's social lives, that they can infer dominance from various cues, and make various inferences from dominance. Moreover, young children have been shown to take other social cues into account when evaluating testimony, even when those cues do not have obvious epistemic value like gender (Terrier, Bernard, Mercier, & Clément, 2016) or minimal group membership (MacDonald, Schug, Chase, & Barth, 2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

The boss is always right: Preschoolers endorse the testimony of a dominant over that of a subordinate

Bernard

Castelain

Mercier

et al. 2016

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Recent research has shown that young children rely on social cues to evaluate testimony. For instance, they prefer to endorse testimony provided by a consensual group than by a single dissenter. Given that dominance is pervasive in children's social environment, it can be hypothesized that children also use dominance relations in their selection of testimony. To test this hypothesis, a dominance asymmetry was induced between two characters either by having one repeatedly win in physical contests (physical power; Experiment 1) or by having one repeatedly impose her goals on the other (decisional power; Experiment 2). In two subsequent testimony tasks, 3- to 5-year-old children significantly tended to endorse the testimony of the dominant over that of the subordinate. These results suggest that preschoolers take dominance into account when evaluating testimony. In conclusion, we discuss two potential explanations for these findings.

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Visual access trumps gender in 3- and 4-year-old children’s endorsement of testimony

Cited by 31 publications

References 23 publications

Evidence for a sex effect during overimitation: boys copy irrelevant modelled actions more than girls across cultures

Evidence for a sex effect during overimitation: boys copy irrelevant modelled actions more than girls across cultures

The role of epistemic and social characteristics in children’s selective trust: Three meta‐analyses

The boss is always right: Preschoolers endorse the testimony of a dominant over that of a subordinate

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