Children’s learning from others: Conformity to unconventional counting

Abstract

The current study investigated whether children’s conformity to a majority testimony influenced their willingness to revise their own erroneous counting knowledge. The content of the testimonies focused on conventional rules of counting, by means of pseudoerrors (i.e., unconventional counts) occurring during a detection task. In this work measurements were taken at two different time points. At time 1 children aged 5 to 7 years ( N = 88) first made independent judgments on the correctness of unconventional counting procedures presented by means of a computerized detection task. Subsequently, they watched a video in which four teachers (unanimous majority) or three (non-unanimous majority) made correct claims about the counts and children had to decide whether the informants were right or not, and justify their answers. Our participants conformed significantly more when the correct testimony was provided by a unanimous majority than by a non-unanimous majority. In addition, in two of the three pseudoerrors presented, there was no difference in the children’s tendency to conform to unconventional counts as age increased. At time 2, which was taken to test whether the effect of the testimony was maintained over time, the responses of the 32 children (16 from each age group) who had endorsed the claims of the unanimous majority at time 1 revealed that teachers’ testimonies only had a lasting influence on elementary school children’s understanding of conventional counting rules.

The Relationship Between Confidence and Conformity in a Non-routine Counting Task With Young Children: Dedicated to the Memory of Purificación Rodríguez

“…The authors concluded that children weighted the arguments of the informants and sided with claims that were not counterintuitive to them. Lago et al (2019) extended these findings by modifying the experimental situation, testing conformity following an Asch-style paradigm. Children aged from 5 to 7 years faced only correct majority claims (accepting pseudoerrors as valid counts) that run counter to their own knowledge.…”

“…Empirical evidence with the detection paradigm has demonstrated that children have misconceptions about the non-essential nature of conventional counting rules even well into primary school (LeFevre et al, 2006;Kamawar et al, 2010;Rodríguez et al, 2013;Escudero et al, 2015;Lago et al, 2016Lago et al, , 2019. In these studies, children observed a character performing standard correct counts (that comply both with logical and conventional rules), erroneous counts (which break logical rules), and pseudoerrors (not conventional but correct counts that respect logical rules) and were asked to evaluate the correctness of their performance.…”

“…It has been shown that some characteristics of the task can help children accept pseudoerrors as valid counts. These include the explicit mention of the cardinal value after the count (Lago et al, 2016) or listening to the unanimous opinion of a group of teachers regarding its correctness (Lago et al, 2019). Nevertheless, longitudinal and cross-sectional studies on conventional counting rules agree in stating a slow developing rate during the primary school.…”

“…They are selective in deciding which information to endorse, and therefore several factors have already been described. For instance, it is worth mentioning that children defer to the claims of the informants based on (a) their ability to mentally represent the information (Lane et al, 2014), (b) their prior knowledge (Corriveau and Harris, 2010;Chan and Tardif, 2013;Lane et al, 2014;Seston and Kelemen, 2014;Bernard et al, 2015;Enesco et al, 2017;Lago et al, 2019), (c) certain epistemic aspects of the informants (Koening and Harris, 2007;Einav, 2014;Bernard et al, 2015;Rakoczy et al, 2015), (d) whether the testimony is provided by a unanimous rather than a partial majority (Haun et al, 2013;Morgan et al, 2015;Flynn et al, 2018;Lago et al, 2019), or (e) whether the information is consistent or not with their own knowledge or experience (Corriveau and Harris, 2010;Enesco et al, 2017;Lago et al, 2019).…”

“…Children repeat and practice the procedure taught, but, as it has been previously stated, they are still far from understanding the rationale behind it. In this regard, some researchers have addressed whether tendency of the children to conform allows them to question their own erroneous conception of conventional counting rules by using the testimony given by a qualified majority of math teachers (Enesco et al, 2017;Lago et al, 2019).…”