The better part of not knowing: Virtuous ignorance.

Abstract

Suppose you are presented with two informants who have provided answers to the same question. One provides a precise and confident answer, and the other says that they do not know. If you were asked which of these two informants was more of an expert, intuitively you would select the informant who provided the certain answer over the ignorant informant. However, for cases in which precise information is practically or actually unknowable (e.g., the number of leaves on all the trees in the world), certainty and confidence indicate a lack of competence, while expressions of ignorance may indicate greater expertise. In three experiments, we investigated whether children and adults are able to use this “virtuous ignorance” as a cue to expertise. Experiment 1 found that adults and children older than 9 years selected confident informants for knowable information and ignorant informants for unknowable information. However, 5–6-year-olds overwhelmingly favored the confident informant, even when such certainty was completely implausible. In Experiment 2 we replicated the results of Experiment 1 with a new set of items focused on predictions about the future, rather than numerical information. In Experiment 3, we demonstrated that 5–8-year-olds and adults are both able to distinguish between knowable and unknowable items when asked how difficult the information would be to acquire, but those same children failed to reject the precise and confident informant for unknowable items. We suggest that children have difficulty integrating information about the knowability of particular facts into their evaluations of expertise.

Children's understanding of when a person's confidence and hesitancy is a cue to their credibility

“…One limitation in interpreting the results of Experiment 1 is that because children were required to choose between two informants (one previously confident and one previously hesitant) it is impossible to determine whether these results were driven by a tendency to disfavor the overly-confident informant or by a tendency to favor the justifiably hesitant model. A https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227026.g003 similar limitation in interpretation emerged in a related study published while the current research was under investigation [44]. Kominksy, Langthorne, and Keil [44] were interested in examining when children understand the difference between what they referred to as 'mere ignorance' (i.e., not knowing something that is, in principle, knowable) and 'virtuous ignorance' (i.e., not knowing something because the knowledge is impossible or implausible to obtain).…”

“…A https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227026.g003 similar limitation in interpretation emerged in a related study published while the current research was under investigation [44]. Kominksy, Langthorne, and Keil [44] were interested in examining when children understand the difference between what they referred to as 'mere ignorance' (i.e., not knowing something that is, in principle, knowable) and 'virtuous ignorance' (i.e., not knowing something because the knowledge is impossible or implausible to obtain). In their design, 5-to 10-year-olds were presented with silhouetted images of two informants along with descriptions of their answers to either 'knowable' (e.g., 'How many windows are in the White House?')…”

Children show reduced trust in confident advisors who are partially informed

“…However, the account does not explain findings from another study, in which informants were asked for unknowable facts (e.g., the number of leaves on all trees in the world; Kominsky et al, 2016). Children aged 5 and 6 were more likely to ascribe expertise to confident speakers who gave precise answers than to cautious speakers who admitted that they did not know.…”

“…Also, our studies only concerned claims with a potentially subjective component (i.e., the relative quality of ice cream shops). It would be useful to know if the findings extend to purely objective facts, which were the subject of previous studies on children's inflated trust in confident informants (Kominsky et al, 2016;Tenney et al, 2011). We know that young children view opinions and facts differently.…”

“…Nonetheless, children may put too much trust in confident informants, and they appear to have difficulty understanding when confidence is unwarranted (e.g., Kominsky, Langthorne, & Keil, 2016;Tenney, Small, Kondrad, Jaswal, & Spellman, 2011). For example, in one study, 5and 6-year-olds and adults heard a scenario in which two informants, one confident and one cautious, each gave conflicting accounts of an accident they had witnessed (Tenney et al, 2011).…”