Asheley R. Landrum

When Do Children Trust the Expert? Benevolence Information Influences Children's Trust More than Expertise.

How do children use informant niceness, meanness, and expertise when choosing between informant claims and crediting informants with knowledge? In Experiment 1, preschoolers met two experts providing conflicting claims for which only one had relevant expertise. Five-year-olds endorsed the relevant experts claim and credited him with knowledge more often than 3-year-olds. In Experiment 2, niceness/meanness information was added. Although children most strongly preferred the nice relevant expert, the children often chose the nice irrelevant expert when the relevant one was mean. In Experiment 3, a mean expert was paired with a nice non-expert. Although this nice informant had no expertise, preschoolers continued to endorse his claims and credit him with knowledge. Also noteworthy, children in all three experiments seemed to struggle more to choose the relevant experts claim than to credit him with knowledge. Together, these experiments demonstrate that niceness/meanness information can powerfully influence how children evaluate informants.

Learning to trust and trusting to learn: a theoretical framework

Learning from other people requires integrating reasoning about an informants psychological properties, such as knowledge and intent, with reasoning about the implications of the data the informant chooses to present. Here, we argue for an approach that considers these two reasoning paths as interrelated, reciprocal processes that develop over experience and guide learners when acquiring knowledge about the world.

Determining who to question, what to ask, and how much information to ask for: the development of inquiry in young children.

To obtain reliable information, it is important to identify and effectively question knowledgeable informants. Two experiments examined how age and the ease of distinguishing between reliable and unreliable sources influence childrens ability to effectively question those sources to solve problems. A sample of 3- to 5-year-olds was introduced to a knowledgeable informant contrasted with an informant who always gave inaccurate answers or one who always indicated ignorance. Children were generally better at determining which informant to question when a knowledgeable informant was contrasted with an ignorant informant than when a knowledgeable informant was contrasted with an inaccurate informant. In some cases, age also influenced the ability to determine who to question and what to ask. Importantly, in both experiments, the strongest predictor of accuracy was whether children had acquired sufficient information; successful problem solving required integrating knowledge of who to question, what to ask, and how much information to ask for.

Culturally antagonistic memes and the Zika virus: an experimental test

This paper examines a remedy for a defect in existing accounts of public risk perceptions. The accounts in question feature two dynamics: the affect heuristic, which emphasizes the impact of visceral feelings on information processing; and the cultural cognition thesis, which describes the tendency of individuals to form beliefs that reflect and reinforce their group commitments. The defect is the failure of these two dynamics, when combined, to explain the peculiar selectivity of public risk controversies: despite their intensity and disruptiveness, such controversies occur less frequently than the affect heuristic and the cultural cognition thesis seem to predict. To account for this aspect of public risk perceptions, the paper describes a model that adds the phenomenon of culturally antagonistic memes – argumentative tropes that fuse positions on risk with contested visions of the best life. Arising adventitiously, antagonistic memes transform affect and cultural cognition from consensus-generating, truth-convergent influences on information processing into conflictual, identity-protective ones. The paper supports this model with experimental results involving perceptions of the risk of the Zika virus: a general sample of US subjects, whose cultural orientations were measured with the Cultural Cognition Worldview Scales, formed polarized affective reactions when exposed to information that was pervaded with antagonistic memes linking Zika to global warming; when exposed to comparable information linking Zika to unlawful immigration, the opposing affective stances of the subjects flipped in direction. Normative and prescriptive implications of these results are discussed.

Inducing Knowledgeability From Niceness: Children Use Social Features for Making Epistemic Inferences

In many ways, evaluating informants based on their features is a problem of induction: Children rely on the assumption that observable informant characteristics (e.g., traits, behaviors, social categories) will predict unobservable characteristics (e.g., future behavior, knowledge states, intentions). Yet to make sensible inferences, children must recognize what informant features are relevant for what types of inferences. The current research investigated whether preschoolers use social features (e.g., niceness) for making epistemic inferences and, conversely, whether they use intellectual features (e.g., expertise) for making social inferences. In the study, 96 preschoolers (Mage = 4.96 years) were asked to attribute knowledge and behaviors to a mean informant, a nice informant, and a neutral informant. Between subjects, we varied which informant had expertise. We found that when attributing knowledge, children used both features: attributing more knowledge to nicer informants, but also attributing more knowledge to an informant when he had expertise. In contrast, when making social inferences, children relied primarily on social features.

Learning Who Knows What: Children Adjust Their Inquiry to Gather Information from Others.

The current research focuses on how children’s inquiry may be affected by how they learn about which sources are likely to provide accurate, helpful information. Four- and 5-year-olds (N = 188) were tasked with asking two different puppet informants – one knowledgeable and one not knowledgeable – questions to determine which of four pictures was inside of a set of boxes. Before beginning the task, children learned about the knowledge status of the two informants in one of three learning conditions: (a) by witnessing how the informants answered sample questions (i.e., show condition), (b) by being told what informants knew (i.e., tell condition), or (c) by both (i.e., show & tell condition). Five-year-olds outperformed 4-year-olds on most parts of the inquiry process. Overall, children were less certain about which informant had been most helpful when they found out that information solely via observation as compared to when they had some third-party information about the informant knowledge. However, children adjusted their questioning strategies appropriately, more frequently asking questions that served to double check the answers they were receiving in the observation only condition. In sum, children were highly resilient, adjusting their questioning strategies based on the information provided, leading to no overall differences in their accuracy of determining the contents of the boxes between the three learning conditions. Implications for learning from others are discussed.

Open and transparent research practices and public perceptions of the trustworthiness of agricultural biotechnology organizations

Public trust in agricultural biotechnology organizations that produce so-called ‘genetically-modified organisms’ (GMOs) is affected by misinformed attacks on GM technology and worry that producers’ concern for profits overrides concern for the public good. In an experiment, we found that reporting that the industry engages in open and transparent research practices increased the perceived trustworthiness of university and corporate organizations involved with GMOs. Universities were considered more trustworthy than corporations overall, supporting prior findings in other technology domains. The results suggest that commitment to, and communication of, open and transparent research practices should be part of the process of implementing agricultural biotechnologies. Abstract