Do teachers’ conflicting testimonies influence children’s decisions about unconventional rules of counting?

What Makes Children Defy Majorities? The Role of Dissenters in Chinese and Spanish Preschoolers’ Social Judgments

“…More surprisingly, Spanish preschoolers rejected the opinion of not only a majority of adults but also their own teacher when suggesting non-conventional (but plausible) uses of common objects (e.g., using a bottle to drink soup or a fork to comb one’s hair; (Guerrero et al, in press). In the same line, within the context of number, Spanish children aged 4–7 opposed the claims of a majority of teachers regarding correct but unconventional procedures of counting (Enesco et al, in press). Regarding this apparent “lack of deference” to authority, we can speculate about the educational system and the subtleties of the child-teacher relationship in Spain, compared to other countries.…”

“…In particular, contrary to the conventional assumptions about the East–West cultures, Chan found that the Hong Kong preschoolers selectively relied on their prior beliefs to endorse or reject the information provided by the teacher, while the U.S. preschoolers were more compliant with the teacher’s claims. An additional example of the mixed findings with children from different cultures comes from a series of studies conducted with Spanish preschoolers facing labeling tasks (Guerrero et al, in press) or counting tasks (Enesco et al, in press). It should be mentioned that the Spanish culture, in terms of the cultural approach, is commonly considered as more collectivistic than American culture but still more self-oriented than East Asian cultures (Oyserman et al, 2002).…”

“…However, contrary to this expectation, Guerrero et al (in press) found that Spanish preschoolers did not show any bias toward majority when endorsing new labels; instead, they were as likely to support the majority claim as the dissenter claim. Also, in the study by Enesco et al (in press), the Spanish preschoolers did not defer to the consensus but relied on their beliefs about counting procedures to accept or reject the majority’s assertions. In sum, the still few studies with young Spaniards reveal a fairly limited influence of consensus in their decisions.…”

Children’s learning from others: Conformity to unconventional counting

“…The question is, will the trust in the testimony of others (specifically in consensual judgments, since conformist transmission is a key component of social learning as stated by Harris, 2012; or Muthukrishna, Morgan, & Henrich, 2016), be sufficient to encourage an increase in the slow pace of development of the comprehension of conventional counting rules? A previous study with preschoolers and second graders (Enesco, Rodríguez, Lago, Dopico, & Escudero, 2017), showed that when children have a strong prior knowledge, they are reluctant to endorse counterintuitive testimonies about conventional rules of counting, even when the information is provided by a majority of teachers. Children faced two conflicting claims regarding the acceptability of pseudoerrors: one offered by three teachers in agreement, the other one offered by a lone teacher (dissident).…”

“…However, a control pseudoerror unanimously justified as a correct count by the four teachers showed a different pattern, since around 62% of the participants sided with the unanimous majority, although only 30% of them still accepted it as a valid count when asked two weeks later, just as it happened with the rest of the pseudoerrors. Thus, Enesco, Rodríguez, Lago, Dopico, and Escudero (2017) concluded that confronting two different perspectives (one of them coinciding with the child’s own view) did not favor the child’s willingness to revise their prior ideas.…”