Young Children Have a Specific, Highly Robust Bias to Trust Testimony

Jaswal, Vikram K.; Croft, Aimee; Setia, Alison R.; Cole, Caitlin

doi:10.1177/0956797610383438

Cited by 192 publications

(238 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…In the developmental literature on deception, young children are often seen to have difficulty in deceiving others (19,20) and in interpreting overtly deceptive points from others (21,22). In the literature on children's ability to mistrust others, children are typically presented with putatively unreliable speakers (of inaccurate, ignorant, and antisocial varieties) (23)(24)(25).…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s strategic theory of mind

Sher¹,

Koenig

Rustichini³

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Human strategic interaction requires reasoning about other people's behavior and mental states, combined with an understanding of their incentives. However, the ontogenic development of strategic reasoning is not well understood: At what age do we show a capacity for sophisticated play in social interactions? Several lines of inquiry suggest an important role for recursive thinking (RT) and theory of mind (ToM), but these capacities leave out the strategic element. We posit a strategic theory of mind (SToM) integrating ToM and RT with reasoning about incentives of all players. We investigated SToM in 3-to 9-y-old children and adults in two games that represent prevalent aspects of social interaction. Children anticipate deceptive and competitive moves from the other player and play both games in a strategically sophisticated manner by 7 y of age. One game has a pure strategy Nash equilibrium: In this game, children achieve equilibrium play by the age of 7 y on the first move. In the other game, with a single mixedstrategy equilibrium, children's behavior moved toward the equilibrium with experience. These two results also correspond to two ways in which children's behavior resembles adult behavior in the same games. In both games, children's behavior becomes more strategically sophisticated with age on the first move. Beyond the age of 7 y, children begin to think about strategic interaction not myopically, but in a farsighted way, possibly with a view to cooperating and capitalizing on mutual gains in long-run relationships.practical reasoning | child development | game theory S trategic environments determine outcomes as a function of the decision of many players. Behavior in these environments is directed by a capacity we term strategic theory of mind (SToM), the capacity to infer other people's mental processes and predict their behavior on the basis of knowledge of their incentives and assumption of their rationality. SToM requires two more primitive capacities. The first is "ordinary" theory of mind (ToM), which is a person's ability to "impute mental states to himself and others" (1). The second is recursive thinking (RT), which is the ability to use the output of one step of a reasoning process as input to a following step. In addition, SToM requires that agents reason about the incentives of all involved.To take an example of the combination of ToM, RT, and reasoning about incentives that will be relevant in the context of this study, suppose that Ann and Bob play a game with rules known to both players, where the rules imply that Ann has an incentive to lie to Bob when Bob believes her. Ann can conclude that she should lie to Bob. Similarly, Bob can conclude that Ann has an incentive to lie to him, and hence he will not believe her. However, in the same manner, Ann concludes that Bob will perform exactly the same reasoning, so that Bob will be skeptical in view of Ann's incentive to lie. Ann will use this output of her reasoning about Bob's incentives as input for her next step of reasoning, and conclu...

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Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s strategic theory of mind

Sher¹,

Koenig

Rustichini³

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…While her arguments were specific to copying behaviors, one could imagine similar arguments extending to word learning. Indeed, Jaswal, Croft, Setia, and Cole (2010;see also Mills, 2013) suggesting that "dumb attentional" associative mechanisms could govern conceptual development and category-based inference in preschoolers (e.g., Sloutsky & Fisher, 2004;Smith, Jones, & Landau, 1996).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Eighteen-month-olds selectively generalize words from accurate speakers to novel contexts

Luchkina¹,

Sobel²,

Morgan³

2018

Preprint

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• Toddlers generalize words learned from speakers who accurately label familiar objects, but not speakers who are inaccurate.• When speakers ask questions that contain accurate or inaccurate labels for objects during familiarization, toddlers do not consider either speaker a reliable source of knowledge for novel labels.• These data suggest that toddlers are using more than word-object-speaker associations to determine speaker reliability. | INTRODUC TI ONBecause the relation between how a word sounds and what a word means is arbitrary and conventional (Saussure, 1916(Saussure, /1966, children must learn the meanings of words from other competent language users. Several studies have found that preschoolers use speakers' history of accuracy in labeling familiar words when they learn meanings of novel words. For example, Koenig and colleagues (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2005) have shown that 4-year-olds identified an informant who was accurate in labeling familiar objects as knowledgeable about the meaning of words, and predicted that she would be more likely to know the name of a novel object over an informant who was always inaccurate at labeling familiar objects.Even before children reach preschool age, they exhibit an ability to track interlocutors' competence or accuracy and use it in learning situations. For example, Zmyj, Buttelmann, Carpenter, and Daum (2010) showed that 14-month-olds are less likely to imitate agents' novel actions when those agents use familiar objects incompetently (for example, putting a shoe on their hand instead of foot) than when agents use familiar objects competently. Similarly, 12-month-olds track informants' competence and use it in their own exploratory behavior (Stenberg, 2013). Even 8-month-old infants have the capacity to monitor the reliability of a potential informant's gaze and AbstractThe present studies examine whether and how 18-month-olds use informants' accuracy to acquire novel labels for novel objects and generalize them to a new context. In Experiment 1, two speakers made statements about the labels of familiar objects. One used accurate labels and the other used inaccurate labels. One of these speakers then introduced novel labels for two novel objects. At test, toddlers saw those two novel objects and heard an unfamiliar voice say one of the labels provided by the speaker. Only toddlers who had heard the novel labels introduced by the accurate speaker looked at the appropriate novel object above chance. Experiment 2 explored possible mechanisms underlying this difference in generalization. Rather than making statements about familiar objects' labels, both speakers asked questions about the objects' labels, with one speaker using accurate labels and the other using inaccurate labels. Toddlers' generalization of novel labels for novel objects was at chance for both speakers, suggesting that toddlers do not simply associate hearing the accurate label with the reliability of the speaker. We discuss these results in terms of potential mechanisms by which children learn ...

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“…Recently, developmental researchers have proposed that others' testimony is relevant as children learn and reason about the physical, natural, and social world. Recent studies have shown that children make use of direct information from others when they acquire conventional knowledge in many social contexts (Harris, 2012;Jaswal, 2010;Jaswal, Carrington, Setia, & Cole, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preschoolers’ Trust in Social Consensus Varies by Context: Conventional vs. Moral Domains

et al. 2016

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Título: La confianza de los niños en el consenso depende del contexto: convencional vs. moral. Resumen: Cuando una mayoría aprueba una exclusión social ¿los niños son fieles a sus opiniones personales o muestran deferencia hacia la mayoría? Teniendo en cuenta investigaciones previas sobre la preferencia de los niños por el testimonio de una mayoría de adultos frente al de un disidente cuando deben aprender palabras, en este trabajo se estudió esta preferencia por el consenso social en dos contextos: exclusión racial entre iguales y aprendizaje de palabras nuevas. El objetivo fue estudiar si la preferencia por la mayoría puede generalizarse a otros contextos. En este trabajo participaron 90 niños de Educación Infantil del grupo étnico mayoritario en España. Los resultados mostraron que los niños se alineaban con la mayoría significativamente menos en el contexto de exclusión que en el de aprendizaje de palabras. Además, rechazaban la opinión del consenso cuando este aprobaba la exclusión de un niño de una actividad grupal, incluso cuando el excluido era de un grupo étnico-racial diferente al propio; por el contrario, los participantes se alineaban con el disidente que condenaba la exclusión, a pesar de que esto implicaba oponerse a la mayoría. Estos resultados proporcionan información relevante sobre el desarrollo del conocimiento social infantil. Palabras clave: desarrollo social; desarrollo cognitivo; juicios morales; consenso social; testimonio.Abstract: Do young children give priority to following personal beliefs over the testimony of a majority group of adults that approves of social exclusion? Following current research on children's preference for nondissenters when learning the names for novel objects, this study investigated children's preference for consensus opinion in two contexts: Interracial social exclusion among peers and novel object labeling. The goal was to examine the generalizability of preference for the opinion of nondissenters in a socially relevant context. This study was conducted with 90 preschool children from the Spanish ethnic majority group. The findings revealed that participants sided with the consensus significantly less often in the social exclusion context than in the novel object labeling context. Moreover, young children did not defer to the opinion of a numerical consensus in the socially meaningful context when a group condoned the exclusion of a peer from a group activity, even when the peer was from an outgroup social category. Instead, participants agreed with a dissenter who claimed that it was not okay to exclude someone, despite the opposite opinion of a numerical majority. These results provide new information regarding children's social knowledge development.

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Young Children Have a Specific, Highly Robust Bias to Trust Testimony

Cited by 192 publications

References 33 publications

Children’s strategic theory of mind

Children’s strategic theory of mind

Eighteen-month-olds selectively generalize words from accurate speakers to novel contexts

Preschoolers’ Trust in Social Consensus Varies by Context: Conventional vs. Moral Domains

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