Melissa A. Koenig

Trust in Testimony: Children's Use of True and False Statements:

The extent to which young children monitor and use the truth of assertions to gauge the reliability of subsequent testimony was examined. Three- and 4-year-old children were presented with two informants, an accurate labeler and an inaccurate labeler. They were then invited to learn names for novel objects from these informants. The children correctly monitored and identified the informants on the basis of the truth of their prior labeling. Furthermore, children who explicitly identified the unreliable or reliable informant across two tasks went on to demonstrate selective trust in the novel information provided by the previously reliable informant. Children who did not consistently identify the unreliable or reliable informant proved indiscriminate.

Preschoolers Monitor the Relative Accuracy of Informants.

In 2 studies, the sensitivity of 3- and 4-year-olds to the previous accuracy of informants was assessed. Children viewed films in which 2 informants labeled familiar objects with differential accuracy (across the 2 experiments, children were exposed to the following rates of accuracy by the more and less accurate informants, respectively: 100% vs. 0%, 100% vs. 25%, 75% vs. 0%, and 75% vs. 25%). Next, children watched films in which the same 2 informants provided conflicting novel labels for unfamiliar objects. Children were asked to indicate which of the 2 labels was associated with each object. Three-year-olds trusted the more accurate informant only in conditions in which 1 of the 2 informants had been 100% accurate, whereas 4-year-olds trusted the more accurate informant in all conditions tested. These results suggest that 3-year-olds mistrust informants who make a single error, whereas 4-year-olds track the relative frequency of errors when deciding whom to trust.

The role of social cognition in early trust

Language serves as a means of learning from other people. However, communication systems allow the truth to be disguised, whether out of ignorance, fear, deviousness or mistaken judgment. Recent research has explored the extent to which young children are selective in whom they trust for information and the mechanisms that support such selectivity.

The basis of epistemic trust: Reliable testimony or reliable sources?

What is the nature of children’s trust in testimony? Is it based primarily on evidential correlations between statements and facts, as stated by Hume, or does it derive from an interest in the trustworthiness of particular speakers? In this essay, we explore these questions in an effort to understand the developmental course and cognitive bases of children’s extensive reliance on testimony. Recent work shows that, from an early age, children monitor the reliability of particular informants, differentiate between those who make true and false claims and keep that differential accuracy in mind when evaluating new information from these people. We argue that this selective trust is likely to involve the mentalistic appraisal of speakers rather than surface generalizations of their behavior. Finally, we review the significance of children’s deference to adult authority on issues of naming and categorization. In addition to challenging a purely inductive account of trust, these and other findings reflect a potentially rich set of tools brought by children to the task of learning from people’s testimony.

Selective Social Learning: New Perspectives on Learning From Others

This special issue was motivated by the recent, wide-ranging interest in the development of childrens selective social learning. Human beings have a far-reaching dependence on others for information, and the focus of this issue is on the processes by which children selectively and intelligently learn from others. It showcases some of the finest current work in this area and also aims to encourage new lines of investigation and new ways of thinking about how children learn from others. This issue also serves to highlight this new direction in basic research for the broader community of researchers, educators, and practitioners. Research on issues related to the facilitation of social learning has clear relevance to early educational contexts. In addition, by bringing together a varied pool of research on the same general topic, developmental scientists can discern the consistencies and themes that emerge from their collective efforts. The work presented here illustrates the breadth of childrens selectivity across ages and domains of development, and it highlights the growing range of methods that can be recruited to investigate selectivity. This new research leads the field to reconsider the various ways in which social information guides learning and calls for novel theoretical accounts of these developments.

Heralding the Authoritarian? Orientation Toward Authority in Early Childhood

In the research reported here, we examined whether individual differences in authoritarianism have expressions in early childhood. We expected that young children would be more responsive to cues of deviance and status to the extent that their parents endorsed authoritarian values. Using a sample of 43 preschoolers and their parents, we found support for both expectations. Children of parents high in authoritarianism trusted adults who adhered to convention (vs. adults who did not) more than did children of parents low in authoritarianism. Furthermore, compared with children of parents low in authoritarianism, children of parents high in authoritarianism gave greater weight to a status-based “adult = reliable” heuristic in trusting an ambiguously conventional adult. Findings were consistent using two different measures of parents’ authoritarian values. These findings demonstrate that children’s trust-related behaviors vary reliably with their parents’ orientations toward authority and convention, and suggest that individual differences in authoritarianism express themselves well before early adulthood.

Reducing an in‐group bias in preschool children: the impact of moral behavior

How impressionable are in-group biases in early childhood? Previous research shows that young children display robust preferences for members of their own social group, but also condemn those who harm others. The current study investigates childrens evaluations of agents when their group membership and moral behavior conflict. After being assigned to a minimal group, 4- to 5-year-old children either saw their in-group member behave antisocially, an out-group member act prosocially, or control agents, for whom moral information was removed. Childrens explicit preference for and willingness to share with their in-group member was significantly attenuated in the presence of an antisocial in-group member, but not a prosocial out-group member. Interestingly, childrens learning decisions were unmoved by a persons moral behavior, instead being consistently guided by group membership. This demonstrates that childrens in-group bias is remarkably flexible: while moral information curbs childrens in-group bias on social evaluations, social learning is still driven by group information.

Children's strategic theory of mind.

Significance Human interaction requires reasoning not only about other people’s observed behavior and mental states but also about their incentives and goals. The development of children’s strategic thinking is not well understood, leaving open critical questions about early human capacity for strategic interaction. We investigated strategic reasoning in 3- to 9-y-old children and adults in two strategic games that represent prevalent aspects of social interaction: incentives to mislead and competition. We find that despite strategic differences in the two games, by the age of 7 y, children’s behavior is similar to that of adults. Our findings also show an early sophisticated ability to think strategically about others in both static and repeated interactions. Human strategic interaction requires reasoning about other people’s behavior and mental states, combined with an understanding of their incentives. However, the ontogenic development of strategic reasoning is not well understood: At what age do we show a capacity for sophisticated play in social interactions? Several lines of inquiry suggest an important role for recursive thinking (RT) and theory of mind (ToM), but these capacities leave out the strategic element. We posit a strategic theory of mind (SToM) integrating ToM and RT with reasoning about incentives of all players. We investigated SToM in 3- to 9-y-old children and adults in two games that represent prevalent aspects of social interaction. Children anticipate deceptive and competitive moves from the other player and play both games in a strategically sophisticated manner by 7 y of age. One game has a pure strategy Nash equilibrium: In this game, children achieve equilibrium play by the age of 7 y on the first move. In the other game, with a single mixed-strategy equilibrium, children’s behavior moved toward the equilibrium with experience. These two results also correspond to two ways in which children’s behavior resembles adult behavior in the same games. In both games, children’s behavior becomes more strategically sophisticated with age on the first move. Beyond the age of 7 y, children begin to think about strategic interaction not myopically, but in a farsighted way, possibly with a view to cooperating and capitalizing on mutual gains in long-run relationships.

Changing your mind about things unseen: Toddlers’ sensitivity to prior reliability

The goal of this research was to investigate the extent to which young children use the past reliability of another persons statements to make inferences about the accuracy of that persons claims about a hidden toy. When children interacted with a previously reliable speaker, both 30- and 36-month-olds searched in the new location of the toy, in line with the speakers statement. When children interacted with an unreliable speaker, the 36-month-olds were less likely to rely on her false statement and instead searched either in the original location of the toy or in a neutral location. The 30-month-olds, however, searched in the location indicated by the speaker even when the speaker was unreliable. These results show that by 36 months of age, children begin to use reliability in processing a speakers episodic claims and can flexibly update their representations of absent objects depending on the reliability of the speaker.

Cognitive Foundations of Learning from Testimony

&NA; Humans acquire much of their knowledge from the testimony of other people. An understanding of the way that information can be conveyed via gesture and vocalization is present in infancy. Thus, infants seek information from well‐informed interlocutors, supply information to the ignorant, and make sense of communicative acts that they observe from a third‐party perspective. This basic understanding is refined in the course of development. As they age, childrens reasoning about testimony increasingly reflects an ability not just to detect imperfect or inaccurate claims but also to assess what inferences may or may not be drawn about informants given their particular situation. Children also attend to the broader characteristics of particular informants—their group membership, personality characteristics, and agreement or disagreement with other potential informants. When presented with unexpected or counterintuitive testimony, children are prone to set aside their own prior convictions, but they may sometimes defer to informants for inherently social reasons.