3 research outputs found
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Does informational independence always matter? Children believe small group discussion is more accurate than ten times as many independent informants
Learners faced with competing statements that each have
support from multiple sources must decide whom to trust.
Lacking firsthand knowledge, they frequently trust the
majority. Yet, majorities can be misleading if most members
are relying on hearsay from just a few members with
firsthand knowledge. Thus, past work has emphasized the
importance of informational independence when deciding
whom to trust, showing that children and adults do consider
informational independence important in certain contexts.
However, because informational independence precludes
group deliberation, we ask whether children make the reverse
inference and devalue informational independence when
facing a problem that could benefit from deliberation. In two
studies, children and adults ignore informational
independence when attempting to answer abstract reasoning
questions. However, for a question type for which
deliberative reasoning would be of doubtful benefit, children
and adults seek advice from multiple independent sources
rather than a deliberative group
Thinking for themselves?: the effect of informant independence on children’s endorsement of testimony from a consensus
Testimony agreement across a number of people can be a reassuring sign of a claim’s reliability. However, reliability may be undermined if informants do not respond independently. In this case, social consensus may be a result of indiscriminate copying or conformity and does not necessarily reflect shared knowledge or opinion. We examined children’s emerging sensitivity to consensus independence by testing whether it affected their judgements in a social learning context. Children ages 5, 6 and 8-9 years (N = 92), and 20 adults for comparison, received conflicting testimony about an unfamiliar country from two consensual groups of informants: An independent group who responded privately and a non-independent group who had access to each other’s answers. We found increasing levels of trust in independent consensus with age. Adults and 8-9 year-olds preferred to accept the claims of the independent consensus, whereas 5-year-olds favored the claims of the non-independent consensus and 6-year-olds were mixed. Although previous work has shown that children trust a consensus over a lone dissenter as young as 2 years, the developmental shift in this study indicates that children’s reasoning about the nature of consensus and what makes it reliable continues to develop throughout middle childhood
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Can Children Balance the Size of a Majority with the Quality of their Information?
We investigate how children balance the quality of
informants’ knowledge with the number of endorsements
when deciding which of two boxes contains the better option.
When group numbers are equal, children choose boxes
endorsed by informants with visual access over informants
with hearsay (Experiment 1), but are at chance when group
size conflicts with quality of knowledge (Experiments 2 and
3). This suggests that children tend to conform to a majority
opinion, compared to adults (Experiment 4) and a normative
computational model. These studies suggest that preschoolers
consider the testimony of multiple informants and evaluate
their knowledge sources, but may assume that informants are
more individually informative than they ar