Do children and adults use the same cues to judge whether someone is a reliable source of information? In 4 experiments, we investigated whether children (ages 5 and 6) and adults used information regarding accuracy, confidence, and calibration (i.e., how well an informant's confidence predicts the likelihood of being correct) to judge informants' credibility. We found that both children and adults used information about confidence and accuracy to judge credibility; however, only adults used information about informants' calibration. Adults discredited informants who exhibited poor calibration, but children did not. Requiring adult participants to complete a secondary task while evaluating informants' credibility impaired their ability to make use of calibration information. Thus, children and adults may differ in how they infer credibility because of the cognitive demands of using calibration.

Why are some young children consistently willing to believe what they are told even when it conflicts with first-hand experience? In this study, we investigated the possibility that this deference reflects an inability to inhibit a prepotent response. Over the course of several trials, 2.5- to 3.5-year-olds (N = 58) heard an adult contradict their report of a simple event they had both witnessed, and children were asked to resolve this discrepancy. Those who repeatedly deferred to the adult's misleading testimony had more difficulty on an inhibitory control task involving spatial conflict than those who responded more skeptically. These results suggest that responding skeptically to testimony that conflicts with first-hand experience may be challenging for some young children because it requires inhibiting a normally appropriate bias to believe testimony.

Young children are thought to be motivated to avoid individuals who have been wrong in the past so as to minimize the risk of being misinformed. Yet they sometimes act on testimony from formerly inaccurate informants. Most explanations for this behavior have focused on limits in children's ability to process inaccurate testimony, such as difficulty inhibiting the normally appropriate bias to believe what people say. In this article, we argue that children may also use information from formerly inaccurate informants because doing so allows them to achieve other, nonepistemic goals. Testimony not only offers children a way to learn about the world, but it also offers them a way to pursue social goals that may be separate from learning.

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