Role of Expertise, Consensus, and Informational Valence in Children's Performance Judgments

Two experiments examined the role of expertise, consensus, and informational valence on children's acceptance of informant testimony about the quality of work produced by a target child. In Experiment 1, 96 4- to 5.9-year-olds and 6- to 8-year-olds were told about an expert who gave a positive or negative assessment of art or music that was contradicted by one layperson or a consensus of three laypersons. Generally, participants endorsed positive assessments as correct irrespective of expertise and consensus, but older children were more likely than younger children to want to learn from the expert in the future. To examine whether reluctance to accept expertise was due to the negative quality of the information, the expert in Experiment 2 simply stated that additional work was needed. Both age groups selected the expert as correct and reported wanting to learn from the expert in the future. Contributions to social learning models are discussed

Developmental changes in reasoning about cross-classified individuals.

Social categories allow children to make inferences about novel situations, which can then guide their interactions with others. However, this process can be complicated because individuals often belong to many different, sometimes interrelated, social categories. Four experiments examine whether children and adults differ in their willingness to classify a person as holding two social roles (e.g., a mother and a daughter), and how this influences their reasoning. Specifically, this work will examine the influence of cross-classification on inductive inferences, trust in testimony, and knowledge evaluations. The aim of these experiments is to investigate whether children privilege certain roles when reasoning about individuals who hold multiple social roles. Because children rely heavily on their knowledge of individuals’ social roles to interact with them appropriately, it is important that children be able to accurately use these social categories to reason about others. Experiments 1 and 2 explore children’s willingness to cross-classify individuals into a variety of social roles with varying degrees of hierarchical (vs. non-hierarchical) structure. Experiment 2 further examines what cognitive mechanisms may underlie children’s cross-classification behaviors. Experiments 3 and 4 examine how children make inferences about and evaluate the testimony of cross-classified individuals. Overall, the findings of these four experiments illustrate that there are developmental differences in willingness to cross-classify and reasoning about cross-classified individuals occurring between the preschool, early elementary, and adult years. The results of these experiments suggest that cross-classification may influence the way children make inferences about individuals, but that cross-classification does not influence their trust in the testimony of individuals with multiple social roles. This work contributes to our growing understanding of how children utilize information about social categories to reason about others

Expertise in unexpected places: selective social learning from counter-normative experts

Previous research demonstrates that children prefer to use information given by people of their own gender when learning about their environment. However, young children are also very sensitive to the specialized knowledge, or expertise, of others. The present work explored whether children are willing to learn from an expert informant who displays non - traditional gender role interests. Four- to 8-year-olds were presented with conflicting opinions about a piece of domain specific information from a counter-stereotypical expert (e.g., a boy with expertise in ballet), as well as a layperson of the opposite gender (e.g., a girl with little knowledge about ballet). Participants were asked to choose who they believed was correct, who they would prefer to learn from in the future, and how much they liked each character. Overall, participants selected the counter-stereotypical expert as correct. However, 4- to 5-year-olds reported a preference to learn from same-gender participants in the future irrespective of their expertise, whereas 6- to 8-year-olds reported wanting to learn from the counter-stereotypical expert in the future. Gender differences also emerged, with boys of all ages showing greater acceptance of the opinion of a male counter-stereotypical expert as compared to a female counter-stereotypical expert. These results demonstrate that while expertise is a powerful learning cue, there are circumstances in which expert testimony may be disregarded in favor of potent social categorical biases

Do Children Copy an Expert or a Majority? Examining Selective Learning in Instrumental and Normative Contexts

© 2016 Burdett et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This study examined whether instrumental and normative learning contexts differentially influence 4- to 7-year-old children's social learning strategies; specifically, their dispositions to copy an expert versus a majority consensus. Experiment 1 (N = 44) established that children copied a relatively competent "expert" individual over an incompetent individual in both kinds of learning context. In experiment 2 (N = 80) we then tested whether children would copy a competent individual versus a majority, in each of the two different learning contexts. Results showed that individual children differed in strategy, preferring with significant consistency across two different test trials to copy either the competent individual or the majority. This study is the first to show that children prefer to copy more competent individuals when shown competing methods of achieving an instrumental goal (Experiment 1) and provides new evidence that children, at least in our "individualist" culture, may consistently express either a competency or majority bias in learning both instrumental and normative information (Experiment 2). This effect was similar in the instrumental and normative learning contexts we applied

The development of selective copying:Children’s learning from an expert versus their mother

This work was supported by a John Templeton Foundation (grant ID 40128)This study tested the prediction that, with age, children should rely less on familiarity and more on expertise in their selective social learning. Experiment 1 (N = 50) found that 5- to 6-year-olds copied the technique their mother used to extract a prize from a novel puzzle box, in preference to both a stranger and an established expert. This bias occurred despite children acknowledging the expert model's superior capability. Experiment 2 (N = 50) demonstrated a shift in 7- to 8-year-olds toward copying the expert. Children aged 9–10 years did not copy according to a model bias. The findings of a follow-up study (N = 30) confirmed that, instead, they prioritized their own—partially flawed—causal understanding of the puzzle box.PostprintPeer reviewe

Young Children’s Changing Reactions to Counterintuitive Claims

This dissertation examines young children’s acceptance of, memory for, and doubts about counterintuitive claims. In Study 1, children aged 3- to 5-years in the United States and China were asked to categorize hybrids whose perceptual features originated from two different animals or two different objects (75% from one and 25% from the other). At first, most children categorized the hybrids in terms of their predominant perceptual features. However, after hearing counter-perceptual categorizations by an adult, children categorized fewer hybrids in terms of their predominant features. When retested 1-to 2-weeks later, the adult’s earlier counter-intuitive categorizations still impacted children’s categorizations but less strongly. In Study 2, American children aged 3- to 6-years were presented with three different-sized Russian dolls and asked to say which doll was the heaviest. Most children pointed to the biggest doll. They were then told that the smallest doll was the heaviest and that the biggest was the lightest, a claim that was false. Most children subsequently endorsed this claim. Nevertheless, when the experimenter left the room, older children were likely to check it by lifting the biggest and smallest dolls. Younger children rarely conducted such checks. In Study 3, Chinese preschool and elementary school children were presented with five different-sized Russian dolls and asked to indicate the heaviest doll. Half of the children then heard a false, counter-intuitive claim (i.e., smallest = heaviest). The remaining children heard a claim confirming their intuitions (i.e., biggest = heaviest). Again, most children endorsed the experimenter’s claim even when it was counter-intuitive. During the experimenter’s subsequent absence, elementary school children explored the dolls more if they had received counter-intuitive rather than confirming testimony. Preschool children rarely explored no matter what testimony they had received. On the experimenter’s return, children who had explored the dolls were likely to reject her counter-intuitive claim. Thus, counterintuitive claims can overturn children’s beliefs but their influence fades over time and is moderated by children’s opportunities to search for empirical evidence. Across two cultures, older children were more inclined than younger children to use opportunities to seek empirical evidence to check counterintuitive claims

Animals, Superman, Fairy and God: Children’s Attributions of Nonhuman Agent Beliefs in Madrid and London

There have been major developments in the understanding of children’s nonhuman concepts, particularly God concepts, within the past two decades, with a body of cross-cultural studies accumulating. Relatively less research has studied those of non-Christian faiths or children’s concepts of popular occult characters. This paper describes two studies, one in Spain and one in England, examining 5- to 10-year-olds’ human and nonhuman agent beliefs. Both settings were secular, but the latter comprised a Muslim majority. Children were given a false-belief (unexpected contents) task in which they were asked to infer about three humans (mother, classmate, teacher), three animals (dog, bear, bird) and three supernatural beings (Superman, fairy, God). Similar false beliefs about humans, with subtle differences in inferences about animals and supernatural beings, were found between the two locations. In London different patterns for God between participants with a family religion, in particular Muslims, and non-affiliates, were identified as well as an association between religious beliefs and practice and inferences about God. Findings are discussed in the light of theory and research on the role of sociocultural inputs in children’s theory of mind development and understanding of agency

Unnatural pedagogy : a computational analysis of children\u27s learning to learn from other people.

Infants rely on others for much of what they learn. People are a ready source of quick information, but people produce data differently than the world. Data from a person are a result of that person\u27s knowledgeability and intentions. People may produce inaccurate or misleading data. On the other hand, if a person is knowledgeable about the world and intends to teach, that person may produce data that are more useful than simply accurate data: data that are pedagogical. This idea that people have special innate methods for efficient information transfer lies at the heart of recent proposals regarding what makes humans such powerful knowledge accumulators. These innate assumptions result in developmental patterns observed in epistemic trust research. This research seeks to create a computational account of the development of these abilities. We argue that pedagogy is not innate, but rather that people learn to learn from others. We employ novel computational models to show that there is sufficient data early on from which infants may learn that people choose data pedagogically, that the development of children\u27s epistemic trust is primarily a result of their decreasing beliefs that all informants are helpful, and that innate pedagogy would not lead to more rapid learning. We connect results from the pedagogy and epistemic trust literatures across tasks and development, showing that these are different manifestations of the same underlying abilities, and show that pedagogy need not be innate to have powerful implications for learning