Young children's selective trust in informants

Abstract

Young children readily act on information from adults, setting aside their own prior convictions and even continuing to trust informants who make claims that are manifestly false. Such credulity is consistent with a long-standing philosophical and scientific conception of young children as prone to indiscriminate trust. Against this conception, we argue that children trust some informants more than others. In particular, they use two major heuristics. First, they keep track of the history of potential informants. Faced with conflicting claims, they endorse claims made by someone who has provided reliable care or reliable information in the past. Second, they monitor the cultural standing of potential informants. Faced with conflicting claims, children endorse claims made by someone who belongs to a consensus and whose behaviour abides by, rather than deviating from, the norms of their group. The first heuristic is likely to promote receptivity to information offered by familiar caregivers, whereas the second heuristic is likely to promote a broader receptivity to informants from the same culture.

Culture evolves

“…Such receptivity to deliberate demonstration is likely to facilitate children's adoption of 'opaque' procedures whose causal workings may be difficult for them to fully discern. Nevertheless, the final paper by Harris & Corriveau [51] emphasizes that even if children are sometimes hyper-receptive with respect to what they learn, they are selective about whom they learn from. Their findings support other papers in the volume in proposing that children have several biases in their selection of models and informants [37,50].…”

“…Articles in several parts of this issue (e.g. [2,5,6,25,37,50,51]) describe experimental evidence that rules such as 'conform to the majority behaviour', 'copy the most successful individual' and 'learn from familiar individuals' are used by a range of distantly related animals, as well as humans, although differing underlying processes may be involved.…”

“…[2,31,35,37,51]) draw on this tradition. Moreover, we have opted to focus here on culture per se, at the cost of neglecting the larger subject of gene -culture coevolution.…”

“…A different perspective is provided in the four papers of part 4, which do not so much address cultural evolution itself, as how it has shaped minds to acquire complex cultural repertoires [48][49][50][51]. In principle, this is an issue relevant for the subjects of part 1, insofar as the young of any species that displays some degree of culture is expected to be subject to selection pressures shaping ontogenetic processes to facilitate cultural learning.…”

“…Two papers in part 4 provide convergent evidence for such selectivity (see also [37]). Hewlett et al [50] provide the first detailed observational evidence for such learning biases among children growing up in hunter-gatherer communities, while Harris and Corriveau [51] use experimental procedures to demonstrate the early emergence and developmental time-course of such biases.…”