Epistemic vigilance online: Textual inaccuracy and children's selective trust in webpages

In this age of ‘fake news’, it is crucial that children are equipped with the skills to identify unreliable information online. Our study is the first to examine whether children are influenced by the presence of inaccuracies contained in webpages when deciding which sources to trust. Forty‐eight 8‐ to 10‐year‐olds viewed three pairs of webpages, relating to the same topics, where one webpage per pair contained three obvious inaccuracies (factual, typographical, or exaggerations, according to condition). The paired webpages offered conflicting claims about two novel facts. We asked participants questions pertaining to the novel facts to assess whether they systematically selected answers from the accurate sources. Selective trust in the accurate webpage was found in the typos condition only. This study highlights the limitations of 8‐ to 10‐year‐olds in critically evaluating the accuracy of webpage content and indicates a potential focus for educational intervention

Best friends: children use mutual gaze to identify friendships in others

This study examined children’s ability to use mutual eye gaze as a cue to friendships in others. In Experiment 1, following a discussion about friendship, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds were shown animations in which three cartoon children looked at one another, and were told that one target character had a best friend. Although all age groups accurately detected the mutual gaze between the target and another character, only 5- and 6-year-olds used this cue to infer friendship. Experiment 2 replicated the effect with 5- and 6-year-olds when the target character was not explicitly identified. Finally, in Experiment 3, where the attribution of friendship could only be based on synchronized mutual gaze, 6-year-olds made this attribution, while 4- and 5-year-olds did not. Children occasionally referred to mutual eye gaze when asked to justify their responses in Experiments 2 and 3, but it was only by the age of 6 that reference to these cues correlated with the use of mutual gaze in judgements of affiliation. Although younger children detected mutual gaze, it was not until 6 years of age that children reliably detected and justified mutual gaze as a cue to friendship

Does the majority always know best? Young children's flexible trust in majority opinion

Copying the majority is generally an adaptive social learning strategy but the majority does not always know best. Previous work has demonstrated young children's selective uptake of information from a consensus over a lone dissenter. The current study examined children's flexibility in following the majority: do they overextend their reliance on this heuristic to situations where the dissenting individual has privileged knowledge and should be trusted instead? Four- to six- year-olds (N = 103) heard conflicting claims about the identity of hidden drawings from a majority and a dissenter in two between-subject conditions: in one, the dissenter had privileged knowledge over the majority (he drew the pictures); in the other he did not (they were drawn by an absent third party). Overall, children were less likely to trust the majority in the Privileged Dissenter condition. Moreover, 5- and 6- year-olds made majority-based inferences when the dissenter had no privileged knowledge but systematically endorsed the dissenter when he drew the pictures. The current findings suggest that by 5 years, children are able to make an epistemic-based judgment to decide whether or not to follow the majority rather than automatically following the most common view

Children's sensitivity to the mentalistic significance of gaze cues

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

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

PLOS ONE data: Young Children's Flexible Trust in Majority Opinion

<p>The data link to the in press article:</p> <p>Einav, S. (in press). Does the Majority Always Know Best? Young Children's Flexible Trust in Majority Opinion. <em>PLOS ONE.</em></p

Mean number of times participants endorsed the majority view (maximum score = 4) by age and condition and comparisons against chance performance.

<p>*<i>p</i><.05;</p><p>**<i>p</i><.001 when comparing with a chance score of 2.</p