Candice M. Mills

Knowing when to Doubt: Developing a Critical Stance when Learning from Others.

Children may be biased toward accepting information as true, but the fact remains that children are exposed to misinformation from many sources, and mastering the intricacies of doubt is necessary. The current article examines this issue, focusing on understanding developmental changes and consistencies in childrens ability to take a critical stance toward information. Research reviewed includes studies of childrens ability to detect ignorance, inaccuracy, incompetence, deception, and distortion. Particular emphasis is placed on what this research indicates about how children are reasoning about when to trust and when to doubt. The remainder of the article proposes a framework to evaluate preexisting research and encourage further research, closing with a discussion of several other overarching questions that should be considered to develop a model to explain developmental, individual, and situational differences in childrens ability to evaluate information.

The Development of Cynicism

Two experiments explored the development of cynicism by examining how children evaluate other people who make claims consistent or inconsistent with their self-interests. In Experiment 1, kindergartners, second graders, and fourth graders heard stories with ambiguous conclusions in which characters made statements that were aligned either with or against self-interest. Older children took into account the self-interests of characters in determining how much to believe them: They discounted statements aligned with self-interest, whereas they accepted statements going against self-interest. Experiment 2 examined childrens endorsement of three different explanations for potentially self-interested statements: lies, biases, and mistakes. Like adults, sixth graders endorsed lies and bias as plausible explanations for wrong statements aligned with self-interest; younger children did not endorse bias. Implications for the development of cynicism and childrens understanding of bias are discussed.

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.

Preschoolers Use Questions as a Tool to Acquire Knowledge From Different Sources

How do children use questions as tools to acquire new knowledge? The current experiment examined preschool childrens ability to direct questions to appropriate sources to acquire knowledge. Fifty preschoolers engaged in a task that entailed asking questions to discover which special key would open a box that contained a prize. Children solved simple and complex problems by questioning two puppet experts who knew about separate features of each key. Results indicate dramatic developmental differences in the efficiency and efficacy of childrens questions. Although even 3-year-olds asked questions, their questions were largely ineffective and directed toward inappropriate sources. Four-year-olds directed questions toward the appropriate sources but asked approximately equal numbers of effective and ineffective questions. Only 5-year-olds both asked the appropriate sources and formulated effective questions. Implications for the development of problem-solving abilities are discussed.

Biased decision-making: developing an understanding of how positive and negative relationships may skew judgments

The current experiment examines if and when children consider the possibility of relationships skewing judgments when evaluating judgments in different contexts. Eighty-seven 6-year-olds, 8-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and adults heard stories about judges who made decisions matching or mismatching possible relationship biases (e.g. a judge choosing a friend or an enemy as the winner) in contests with objective or subjective criteria. While even 6-year-olds distinguished between subjective and objective contests, neither children nor adults focused on the objectivity of the contest criteria when evaluating a judges claims. Instead, by age 8, if not earlier, children focused on relationships, trusting judgments that mismatched someones relationship biases and discounting judgments that matched someones relationship biases. The findings also suggested that children are better at recognizing that a judgment may have been biased than predicting that one will be, and that they may understand that negative relationships may skew judgments before positive ones.

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.

The Use of Questions as Problem-Solving Strategies during Early Childhood.

This study examined the strategic use of questions to solve problems across early childhood. Participants (N=54, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds) engaged in two tasks: a novel problem-solving question task that required asking questions to an informant to determine which card in an array was located in a box and a cognitive flexibility task that required classifying stimuli by multiple dimensions. The results from the question task indicated that there were age differences in the types of questions asked, with 6-year-olds asking more constraint-seeking questions than 4- and 5-year-olds. The number of constraint-seeking questions asked was the only significant predictor of accuracy. Performance on the cognitive flexibility task correlated with both constraint-seeking strategy use and accuracy in the question task. In sum, our results provide evidence that the capacity to use questions to generate relevant information develops before the capacity to apply this information successfully and consistently to solve complex problems. We propose that the process of using questions as strategic tools is an ideal context for examining how children come to gain active and intentional control over problem solving.

Children's explanations of the intentions underlying others' behaviour

This study investigated developmental differences in childrens explanations of the intentions underlying the behaviours of others, including behaviours that conflicted with their expectations. Children aged 6-13 and adults explained the intentions underlying their predictions of behaviour following stories with ambiguous, positive, and negative cues. Children were then presented with experimenter-provided conflicting behaviour and explained again. Results indicated that with no clear cues, children and adults had optimistic expectations. When cues were provided, participants across development provided explanations consistent with positive cues, but children under age 10 were reluctant to provide explanations consistent with negative cues, despite good recall. When explaining conflicting behaviour, people may hesitate to overlook suspicions of negative intent sometimes even in the face of good behaviour, and this reluctance may increase with age. Findings suggest we may all overcome an optimistic bias, but children under age 10 may struggle more to do so.

Do children trust based on group membership or prior accuracy? The role of novel group membership in children's trust decisions.

Two experiments examined how an informants group membership can influence childrens trust decisions. Participants (3- to 7-year-olds, N=162) were assigned to either the red or blue group based on their selection of a red or blue apron and watched an in-group and out-group informant provide conflicting names for a set of novel objects. When asked which informant they would prefer to rely on for new information, nearly all age groups trusted the in-group informant. Children then watched as each informant varied in accuracy by labeling either all or none of four familiar items accurately and were then asked which informants labels they preferred for learning new information. When the in-group informant had previously demonstrated accuracy, children continued to trust the in-group informant for new information. In contrast, when the in-group informant had previously demonstrated inaccuracy, children were unsure who to trust, with only 6- and 7-year-olds showing a decrease in their trust for the inaccurate in-group informant. These findings demonstrate that group membership can skew how children encode new information and can make children uncertain about whom to trust for information.

Children's skepticism: Developmental and individual differences in children's ability to detect and explain distorted claims

The current study examined some key developmental and individual differences in how elementary school-aged children evaluate sources of information. A sample of 130 children ages 6 to 9 years participated in a task designed to measure childrens understanding of ways that claims can be distorted (i.e., biased decisions, skewed self-reports, and misleading persuasive claims). Children also completed several individual difference measures, including a brief intelligence task and an advanced social cognition measure (interpretive theory of mind). Overall, older children were less trusting and better than younger children at explaining the reasons to doubt sources that might provide distorted claims. Crucially, the results also suggest that beyond age, both general intelligence and advanced social cognitive skills play roles in childrens ability to understand when and why they must doubt sources of distortion.