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

Abstract

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.

When do children learn from unreliable speakers?

“…To manage this risk, children need ways of predicting the likely truth of what they are told. One way children do this is by tracking the speaker's history of accuracy: 4-and 5-year-olds learn new information from a speaker with a history of accuracy rather than from one with a history of inaccuracy (Birch, Vauthier, & Bloom, in press;Jaswal & Neely, 2006;Koenig, Clément, & Harris, 2004;Koenig & Harris, 2005;Scofield & Behrend, 2008). In a typical task, the child participant observes two speakers name several familiar objects, one of whom consistently gives accurate names, while the other gives inaccurate names for no apparent reason, thereby rendering themselves untrustworthy as informants.…”

Children’s developing notions of (im)partiality

“…Research on how children determine fair procedures for offering rewards focuses on the needs of the contestants in contests, or the requirements for winning the contests (e.g., skill versus luck), not on the qualifications of the judges themselves (e.g., Sigelman & Waitzman, 1991; Thorkidsen & White-McNulty, 2002). However, related research examining how children evaluate information suggests that young children recognize the importance of informed testimony and judgments: They distinguish knowledgeable speakers from ignorant ones when learning new words (Jaswal & Neely, 2006;Koenig, Clement, & Harris, 2004;Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2001) and when dealing with misinformation (Welch-Ross, 1999). Four-year-olds understand that sometimes people do not have enough knowledge to provide accurate statements (Sodian, 1988;Wimmer & Perner, 1983), and that some people are more knowledgeable than others for a given topic (Lutz & Keil, 2002).…”

“…For example, according to David Hume, a good judge meets the following description: "strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character," (Hume, 1757). As mentioned in the introduction, previous research has found that even young children prefer listening to and learning from speakers who meet some of these criteria, such as being knowledgeable and perceptually capable (e.g., Jaswal & Neely, 2006;Koenig, Clement, & Harris, 2004;Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2001). Other research with adults finds that they are concerned about judgments that seem skewed by bias (e.g., Miller & Ratner, 1998).…”

“…We predicted that even kindergartners would do well on most of these questions. We based our predictions on prior work showing that young children can take into account knowledge states of others in determining how much to believe them (Jaswal & Neely, 2006;Koenig, Clement, & Harris, 2004;Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2001), can recognize that practice improves performance (Lockhart, Chang, & Story, 2002), can understand the importance of perceptual limitations on knowledge (O'Neill, Astington, & Flavell, 1992), and can understand the importance of motivational states on statements (Mills & Keil, 2005). We also predicted that while we would replicate Experiment 1's finding that kindergartners prefer judges with positive connections over neutral ones, we wound find that even kindergartners would prefer neutral judges to judges with negative connections.…”

A study in the cognition of individuals’ identity: Solving the problem of singular cognition in object and agent tracking

“…Elementary forms of cognitive grasping of these principles might be available at early stages in the development of human cognition (e.g., Baillargeon, 2001;Spelke, 1990), with a more explicit understanding of them emerging in adult sensorimotor skills (Ballard, Hayhoe, Pook, & Rao, 1997;Gibson, 1979;Noë, 2004) and adult 'folk physics' (McCloskey, 1983;McCloskey, Caramazza, & Green, 1980). On the other hand, humans can also interact with and reason about existing, dead or fictional animated 6 and intentional agents-i.e., animated creatures to whom we ascribe intentional states such as beliefs, desires and intentions (e.g., Astuti, 2001;Bloom, 2002Bloom, , 2004Bonatti, Frot, Zangl, & Mehler, 2002;Dennett, 1971Dennett, , 1987Koenig, Clément, & Harris, 2004;Malle, Moses, & Baldwin, 2001;Puccetti, 1968). In order to account for the behavior of such agents we need to add principles not reducible to those used to track physical objects.…”