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Success inhibits preschoolers’ ability to establish selective trust
Abstract
A number of studies have shown that preschoolers make inferences about potential informants based on the informants’ past behavior, selectively trusting an informant who has been helpful in the past, for example, over one who has been unhelpful. Here we used a hiding game to show that 4- and 5-year-olds’ selective trust can also be influenced by inferences they make about their own abilities. Children do not prefer a previously helpful informant over a previously unhelpful one when informant helpfulness is decoupled from children’s success in finding hidden objects (Studies 1 and 3). Indeed, children do not seem to track informant helpfulness when their success at finding hidden objects has never depended on it (Study 2). A single failure to find a hidden object when offered information by the unhelpful informant can, however, lead them to selectively trust the previously helpful one later (Study 4). Children’s selective trust is based not only on differences between informants but also on their sense of illusory control—their inferences about whether they need assistance from those informants in the first place.
... However, in order to effectively do so, they need to assess which individuals can be trusted to provide reliable information (Harris, 2012). Prior research has documented that although preschool-age children can effectively use a variety of strategies to make these kinds of assessments (Marble & Boseovski, 2020;Mills, 2013), they also have serious limitations Palmquist et al., 2016;Vanderbilt et al., 2014). One notable limitation is that they often readily accept information from individuals who have a track record of deceptive behavior, even when this track record is explicitly pointed out to them (Heyman et al., 2013). ...
Learning from others allows young children to acquire vast amounts of information quickly, but doing so effectively also requires epistemic vigilance. Although preschool-age children have some capacity to engage in such processes, they often have trouble resisting information from misleading informants. The present research takes a novel strategic deception training approach to addressing this limitation. The approach is grounded in theoretical work on children's recognition of self-other equivalences (Meltzoff, 2007) and in the default tendency to view communication as helpful (Mascaro et al., 2017). Eighty 3-year-old Singaporean children (Mage = 39.36 months, 37 girls, 90.0% Chinese) were randomly assigned to either an experimental condition, in which they were trained on strategic deception, or to a conservation training control condition. Findings showed that the strategic deception training was effective in promoting epistemic vigilance on a semantic task that involved object naming and no pointing, although the effect did not extend to performance on an episodic task that involved pointing to object locations. These findings provide the first evidence of a causal link between young children's reasoning about how to deceive others and their resistance to being misled by others. In doing so, they shed light on the mechanisms that come into play when children learn epistemic vigilance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
... Although previous studies have shown that children appropriately weigh and transfer information from two sources with a similar format (i.e., verbal claim vs. verbal claim), they have struggled to show whether 3-year-olds are able to transfer their inferences when information is acquired through sources with differing formats (i.e., verbal claim vs. nonverbal evidence) (e.g., Doebel, Rowell, & Koenig, 2016;Fitneva & Dunfield, 2010;Palmquist, Jaswal, & Rutherford, 2016). Hence, it is worth highlighting aspects of the current design that may have helped children to succeed in that transfer. ...
Across two experiments, an adult informant presented 220 preschoolers (34–71 months of age) with either a correct claim or an incorrect claim about how to activate a music box by using one of two toy figures. Children were then prompted to explore the figures and to discover whether the informant’s claim was correct or incorrect. Children who discovered the claim to be incorrect no longer endorsed it. Moreover, their predictions regarding a new figure’s ability to activate the music box were clearly affected by the reliability of the informant’s prior claim. Thus, children reassess an informant’s incorrect claim about an object in light of later empirical evidence and transfer their conclusions regarding the validity of that claim to subsequent objects.
... Em relação às variáveis que podem influenciar os julgamentos de confiança das crianças em idade escolar, os estudos analisados revelam que tanto as características ou atributos do informante como aspectos do contexto comunicativo têm efeitos sobre as decisões das crianças em situações de aprendizagem novas que dependem de informantes. Destacamos aqui os estudos que investigam o nível de atratividade do informante (Bascandziev & Harris, 2016), sua honestidade ou desonestidade (Li et al., 2014), seu gênero (Taylor, 2013), atributos positivos como ser legal e inteligente (Lane et al., 2013), prossocialidade (Palmquist, Jaswal, & Rutherford, 2016), seu sotaque (Kinzler et al., 2011), a consistência entre prometer e cumprir a promessa (Isella et al., 2018) e até crenças em eventos mágicos (Kim & Harris, 2014). Além disso, os resultados sugerem que a vigilância epistêmica das crianças vai se fortalecendo à medida que as crianças progridem em seu desenvolvimento sociocognitivo, em especial, no que diz respeito à teoria da mente (e.g., Brosseau-Liard et al., 2015). ...
Embora o campo de estudos sobre confiança seletiva tenha ganhado destaque nos últimos anos, essa linha de pesquisa não é ainda suficientemente divulgada no Brasil. A presente revisão sistemática teve como objetivo avaliar a produção científica sobre confiança seletiva em crianças pré-escolares, bem como sobre possíveis variáveis que influenciam os julgamentos de confiança. A busca foi realizada nas bases de dados PSYCINFO, Scielo Brasil, PEPSIC e LILACS, utilizando-se as palavras-chave selective trust, epistemic trust e seus correspondentes em português ‘confiança seletiva’ e ‘confiança epistêmica’. De um total de 103 trabalhos, foram analisados 45 artigos empíricos, publicados entre 2008 e 2018, seguindo o protocolo PRISMA. Contrariando uma crença predominante em muitas culturas de que as crianças acreditam em tudo o que ouvem, elas não são consumidoras ingênuas de informação. Discutem-se os efeitos de variáveis individuais e contextuais sobre os julgamentos de confiança seletiva que apontam para direções futuras promissoras de pesquisa.
... 2.1.1. Verifying reliable sources Several findings attested that children manage to select their sources of information and prefer to learn from individuals who proved to be reliable (Harris 2007;mascaro -sperber 2009;palmquisT et al. 2016;poulin-dubois et al. 2011). Pre-schoolers usually prefer trusting adults over peer informants (but see Jaswal and Neely (2006) who showed that children may prefer a peer informant if she proves more accurate). ...
The theory of natural pedagogy provides a model of social learning based on the direct communicative ostensive relation and aimed to the transfer of generic cultural knowledge. The pedagogical transmission of information originates from an explicit manifestation of teaching made by knowledgeable adults, who are naturally inclined
to manifestly provide their cultural baggage to naïve conspecifics. The domain of transferable knowledge encompasses artifact functions, novel means actions, first words, gestural symbols, social practices, and rituals. This teaching process can be fast and efficient in virtue of a natural inclination possessed by infants to seek information and decode signals of ostensive communication. In this sense, the natural pedagogy represents, as the two proponents – György Gergey and Gergely Csibra – claim, «a communicative system of mutual design specialized for the fast and efficient transfer of new and relevant cultural knowledge from knowledge able to ignorant conspecifics». This
book suggests that natural pedagogy utilises early belief attribution competences, which are employed by infants in a variety of contexts to approach and navigate the social world. Therefore, the natural pedagogy, in cooperation with the early mindreading system,
may represent one of the most efficient adaptive strategies to firmly create that deep wittgensteinian «nest of propositions» which build cultural shared beliefs structures to be relied upon and followed.
... One interesting outcome, however, was that children did not more selectively assign the bear to central locations in the spatial memory task across the four trials. This result is in contrast to previous research that showed that children sometimes are more receptive to help when they have experienced recent failures (Palmquist, Jaswal, & Rutherford, 2016). However, we may not have given the children enough exposures to produce such a result, as we were not interested in improvements over time. ...
We assessed the ability of preschool children to assign the most difficult tasks to a symbolic helper. First, children were taught that a toy "helper" could aid them in remembering the location of a hidden item. Children preferentially assigned the helper to the objectively most difficult locations to remember. Each child then completed eight more tests, assessing a range of different skills such as counting, object identification, and word reading. Children again could assign some stimuli in each task to the helper, leaving the remaining stimuli for themselves to respond to in the given tasks. They were not explicitly told to assign the hardest stimulus to the helper. However, children consistently still did so in most tasks, although some tasks showed an effect of age where older children were more proficient in assigning the objectively more difficult stimuli to the helper. These results highlight a potential form of metacognition in young children in which they can monitor difficulty across varied kinds of assessments and use a generalized tool for asking for help that does not require verbal responding.
... Впервые игра в качестве вспомогательного коррекционного метода была использована в начале XX столетия, когда З. Фрейд в 1913 году применил символическую игру через «цепь ассоциаций», позднее игротерапия использовалась как комплексный метод воздействия на личность ребенка (C.L. Ball etc. [2], S. Fishburn etc. [14], K. Haimovitz & C.S. Dweck [17]). При соблюдении определенных правил и требований, через беседу, спонтанную игру, специально организованную игру и внушение, по мнению исследователей, можно добиться устойчивого положительного эффекта в разрешении глубоких внутренних проблем (страхов, тревожности, агрессии и нарушений в коммуникативной сфере) (M.V. Lipsey etc. [21], C. Palmquist etc. [27], B. J. Zvara etc. [37]). ...
... Previous studies have found that children as young as age 3 can weigh factors such as prior accuracy when judging informants (e.g., Koenig, Clément, & Harris, 2004;Koenig & Harris, 2005). By ages 4 and 5, they also take into account additional characteristics, including informants' familiarity (Corriveau & Harris, 2009;Danovitch & Mills, 2014), attractiveness (Bascandziev & Harris, 2014, and benevolence (Johnston, Mills, & Landrum, 2015;Li, Heyman, Xu, & Lee, 2014;Palmquist, Jaswal, & Rutherford, 2016). In these studies, children typically encounter pairs of informants from the same category. ...
In the cultural context of rapidly increasing internet access, two experiments examine how 5- to 8-year-old Chinese children and adults evaluate information from an unspecified internet source or a known human informant (a teacher or a peer). In Experiment 1, when evaluating statements from a variety of domains, adults regarded the internet and a teacher as more trustworthy than a peer. Younger children did not show differential endorsement of statements by any source, and older children endorsed statements attributed to a teacher over those from the internet. In Experiment 2, when the statements involved scientific and historical facts only, all age groups sought out and endorsed information from the internet or a teacher more often than from a peer, but only adults trusted the internet more than the teacher. These results demonstrate that children can reason about the reliability of informants across different categories and that their trust in information sources is contingent on the type of information being presented.
... We conducted a literature review (Morrison et al., 2016;Nelson et al., 2016;Ongley & Malti, 2014;Oyserman et al., 2014;Palmquist et al., 2016) ...
... This helped to ensure that children's later donation to the informant would not be due to differences in children's emotional state (i.e., happy vs. disappointed). Moreover, because children's reasoning about information quality and informant characteristics is influenced by their experience with a task-that is, whether they failed or succeeded (Gillis & Nilsen, 2013;Palmquist, Jaswal, & Rutherford, 2016)-having children in both conditions succeed ensured that any differences between the two conditions could be tied back to the information children received. ...
The ability to assess the value of the information one receives and the intentions of the source of that information can be used to establish cooperative relationships and to identify cooperative partners. Across two experiments, 4- to 8-year-old children (N = 204) received a note with correct, incorrect, or no information that affected their efforts on a search task. Children were told that all informants had played the game before and knew the location of the hidden reward. In the no information condition, children were told that the informant needed to leave before finishing the note and, thus, was not intentionally uninformative. Children rated the note with correct information as more helpful than the note with no information; incorrect information was rated least helpful. When asked about the informant's intentions, children attributed positive intentions when the information was correct and when they received unhelpful information but knew the informant was not intentionally uninformative. Children attributed less positive intentions to the informant when they received incorrect information. When given the chance to reward the informant, children rewarded the informant who provided correct information and no information equally; the informant who provided incorrect information received fewer rewards. Combined, these results suggest that young children assume that informants have positive intentions even when they provide no useful information. However, when the information provided is clearly inaccurate, children infer more negative intentions and reward those informants at lower rates. These results suggest that children tend to reward informants more based on their presumed intentions, placing less weight on the value of the information they provide.
... This helped to ensure that children's later donation to the informant would not be due to differences in children's emotional state (i.e., happy vs. disappointed). Moreover, because children's reasoning about information quality and informant characteristics is influenced by their experience with a task, i.e., whether they failed or succeeded (Gillis & Nilsen, 2013;Palmquist, Jaswal, & Rutherford, 2016), having children in both conditions succeed ensured that any differences between the two conditions could be tied back to the information children received. ...
Assessing the value of the information one receives and the intentions of the source of that information can be used to establish cooperative relationships and to identify cooperative partners. Across two experiments, four- to eight-year-old children (N=204) received a note with correct, incorrect, or no information that affected their efforts on a search task. Children were told that all informants had played the game before and knew the location of the hidden reward. In the no information condition, children were told that the informant had to leave before finishing the note and thus was not intentionally uninformative. Children rated the note with correct information as more helpful than the note with no information; incorrect information was rated least helpful. When asked about the informant’s intentions, children attributed positive intentions when the information was correct and when they received unhelpful information but knew the informant was not intentionally uninformative. Children attributed less positive intentions to the informant when they received incorrect information. When given the chance to reward the informant, children rewarded the informant who provided correct information and no information equally; the informant who provided incorrect information received fewer rewards. Combined, these results suggest that young children assume that informants have positive intentions. However, when the information provided is clearly inaccurate, children infer more negative intentions and reward those informants at lower rates. These results suggest that children tend to reward informants more based on their presumed intentions placing less weight on the value of the information they provide.
Objective: This study examines the portrayals of mothers and fathers in children’s picture books read by millions of parents and children in their formative years. We investigate the extent to which these books present rigid parental stereotypes that misrepresent the potential of family leaders. Method: We performed a content analysis of 203 prominent children’s picture books from recent years to assess the appearances, activities, and emotions of mothers and fathers. Results: Rather than transcending narrow gender stereotypes, fathers in the most-read books continue to be underrepresented, relatively hands-off parents. Mothers are generally portrayed as emotional parents who complete traditional chores and nurture children. Conclusion: The gender socialization of children and parents via children’s books contributes to the notion that mothers and fathers cannot perform as equals in homes or workplaces. Representations of mothers and fathers differ substantially, with fathers playing a secondary role in parenting if they appear at all.
An ability to flexibly learn from others while at other times relying upon one’s own judgments is an important adaptive human capacity. The present research investigated how others’ epistemic states and prior experience of their own independent ability in a given task modulate young children’s selective learning. In particular, we asked whether 4-year-old children’s judgment concerning the location of a hidden object is modulated both by an informant’s knowledge states and by the absence/presence of a prior experience with a particular task. We found that the children were more likely to align their judgment according to the informant’s verbal report when the informant was knowledgeable than when she was ignorant – but only when they had explicitly experienced their own incapability to accurately guess an object's location. The findings suggest that 4-year-old children are able to combine their own experience with others’ input to make their judgment.
When learning about the world, children show a strong tendency to trust information gained through the testimony of other people1,2. At the same time, they also show a preference for gathering information through first-hand exploration3,4. In this pilot study, we assess how the chance to test the reliability of a verbal testimony through first-hand exploration affects future choices to seek information through either inquiry or exploration.
Introduction. The article presents an overview of the main ideas and results of studying the problem of the relationship between social success and emotional experiences of preschool age children. The aim of the study was to identify the relationships between indicators of social success and types of emotional experiences of preschoolers. Materials and methods. The authors employed the following methods of assessing preschoolers' social success: methods of directing social behavior motivation (motivational level), methods of choice in action (the indicator of attitude), behavior type monitoring (behavioral indicator).Colour tests for assessing the emotional status, anxiety tests, methods of revealing fears, and methods of aggression display were applied in order to assess emotional experience of preschool children. Evaluation of the interdependence between indicators of social success and emotional experiences were carried out using Spearman rank correlation (p). The sample consisted of 188 children of senior preschool age. Results. The study identified subgroups of socially successful (n=135) and social failure (n=53) children. It has been established that socially successful children have higher average values of all studied emotions. Correlation analysis showed that high rates of social success have a higher level of emotional experiences: group direction of social behavior motivation is characterized by a neutral emotional state and high levels of fear; positive sociometric status is characterized by high aggression and fear level; active social behavior type was characterized by high aggression and anxiety level. Socially unsuccessful children have lower levels of manifestation of the same emotional experiences. Conclusion. The results allowed to conclude that separate indicators of social success of preschool age children are connected with certain types of emotional experiences. It is revealed that high levels of indicators of preschoolers' social success are associated with a high level of emotional distress - increased aggression, anxiety, and fear, which characterizes emotional stress in achieving and maintaining social success. Low levels of emotional experiences of socially unsuccessful preschoolers indicate their passive social attitudes.
The present study tested how preschoolers weigh two important cues to a person's credibility, namely prior accuracy and confidence, when deciding what to learn and believe. Four-and 5-year-olds (N = 96) preferred to believe information provided by a confident rather than hesitant individual; however, when confidence conflicted with accuracy, preschoolers increasingly favored information from the previously accurate but hesitant individual as they aged. These findings reveal an important developmental progression in how children use others' confidence and prior accuracy to shape what they learn and provide a window into children's developing social cognition, scepticism, and critical thinking. Copyright: ß 2014 Brosseau-Liard et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Preschool children were presented with slides on a computer screen showing a novel object, together with two informants, one with an attractive and one with a less attractive face. Children were asked which informant they would like to ask about the name of the novel object. After hearing the informants provide conflicting names, they were asked who they thought was correct. Children were more likely to endorse names provided by the person with the more attractive face, a bias that cannot be justified on epistemic grounds. The implications of this finding are discussed.
20 Ss from each grade level (kindergarten, Grades 2, 4, 6, and 8) were presented a luck (figures to be matched with a standard were not visible but were on the underside of cards) and a skill (figures were visible) version of a task using items from the Matching Familiar Figures Test. Questioning Ss about the performance of hypothetical others on these tasks revealed 4 levels of differentiation of luck and skill. The least mature Ss focused on the visual complexity of tasks rather than on the fact that the luck task permitted only guessing. On this basis, they expected luck outcomes to reflect effort and considered the luck task to require less effort than the skill task. Only the most mature Ss clearly understood that effort could not affect outcomes on the luck task and selectively attributed skill outcomes to effort and luck outcomes to luck. The most mature Ss also spent less time than did less mature Ss in the face of failure on luck tasks, but spent more time on skill tasks. Findings of age-related differences in the differentiation of skill (effort and ability) and luck and of associated differences in behavior make the analysis of the development of achievement-related cognition and behavior more complete. (13 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A review of the evidence for and against the proposition that self-serving biases affect attributions of causality indicates that there is little empirical support for the proposition in its most general form. Some support was found for the contention that individuals engage in self-enhancing attributions under conditions of success, but only minimal evidence suggested that individuals engage in self-protective attributions under conditions of failure. Moreover, it was proposed that the self-enhancing effect may not be due to motivational distortion, but rather to the tendency of people to (a) expect their behavior to produce success, (b) discern a closer covariation between behavior and outcomes in the case of increasing success than in the case of constant failure, and (c) misconstrue the meaning of contingency. (60 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
60 kindergartners, 4th graders, and 8th graders and 32 college students took part in a game of chance and a game of skill. After each game, Ss predicted the winnings of other players who differed in certain attributes (e.g., IQ) and behavior (e.g., effort) that would influence only skill outcomes. On both chance and skill tasks, older Ss expected the variations in attributes and behavior to have less impact on task outcomes than did younger Ss. Older Ss were more adept at making predictions that reflected the contingency of skill and the noncontingency of chance. Kindergartners showed no ability to make the skill–chance distinction. Fourth graders were aware of the distinction at a gross qualitative level, but they were unaware of some of the most important logical implications of that distinction. Eighth graders and college students were aware of the skill–chance distinction and most of its logical implications, yet their predictions revealed a lingering belief that chance outcomes could be influenced slightly by variations in people's attributes and behavior. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Knowledge transfer is most effective when speakers provide good quality (in addition to accurate) information. Two studies investigated whether preschool- (4-5 years old) and school-age (6-7 years old) children prefer speakers who provide sufficient information over those who provide insufficient (yet accurate) information. Children were provided clues to the location of hidden dots by speakers who varied in quality and accuracy. Subsequently, children decided from whom they would like to receive additional information. In Study 1, when the outcome of the clue was clear, preschool- (n = 40) and school-age (n = 42) children chose to solicit information from sufficient rather than from insufficient speakers. In Study 2, when not provided with information about the outcome of the speakers' clues, school-age (n = 22), but not preschool-age (n = 19), children preferred sufficient relative to insufficient speakers. Results highlight a developmental progression in children's use of information quality as a cue to determining that individuals are preferable informants. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
Do children and adults use the same cues to judge whether someone is a reliable source of information? In 4 experiments, we investigated whether children (ages 5 and 6) and adults used information regarding accuracy, confidence, and calibration (i.e., how well an informant's confidence predicts the likelihood of being correct) to judge informants' credibility. We found that both children and adults used information about confidence and accuracy to judge credibility; however, only adults used information about informants' calibration. Adults discredited informants who exhibited poor calibration, but children did not. Requiring adult participants to complete a secondary task while evaluating informants' credibility impaired their ability to make use of calibration information. Thus, children and adults may differ in how they infer credibility because of the cognitive demands of using calibration.
Three- and 4-year-old children (Homo sapiens) were tested for comprehension of knowledge formation. In Experiment 1, 34 subjects watched as a surprise was hidden under 1 of 4 obscured cups. The experimenter then pointed to the cup. All children searched under the correct cup, but no 3-year-olds (in contrast to most 4-year-olds) could explain how they knew where to look. Subjects then discriminated between simultaneous pointing by 2 adults, one who had hidden a surprise and one who had left the room before the surprise was hidden. Most 4-year-olds (but no 3-year-olds) showed clear discrimination between the adults. In Experiment 2, 16 subjects were tested with procedures designed to make the source of their own knowledge more obvious, but this had no effect on performance. We conclude that studies using very similar procedures with chimpanzees and rhesus macaques were measuring an ability (or inability) to understand how knowledge states form.
A life-span theory of development is presented that is based on the concepts of primary and secondary control. Primary control refers to behaviors directed at the external environment and involves attempts to change the world to fit the needs and desires of the individual. Secondary control is targeted at internal processes and serves to minimize losses in, maintain, and expand existing levels of primary control. Secondary control helps the individual to cope with failure and fosters primary control by channeling motivational resources toward selected action goals throughout the life course. Primary control has functional primacy over secondary control. An analysis of extensive and diverse literatures spanning infancy through old age shows that trade-offs between primary and secondary control undergo systematic shifts across the life course in response to the opportunities and constraints encountered.
In 2 studies, the sensitivity of 3- and 4-year-olds to the previous accuracy of informants was assessed. Children viewed films in which 2 informants labeled familiar objects with differential accuracy (across the 2 experiments, children were exposed to the following rates of accuracy by the more and less accurate informants, respectively: 100% vs. 0%, 100% vs. 25%, 75% vs. 0%, and 75% vs. 25%). Next, children watched films in which the same 2 informants provided conflicting novel labels for unfamiliar objects. Children were asked to indicate which of the 2 labels was associated with each object. Three-year-olds trusted the more accurate informant only in conditions in which 1 of the 2 informants had been 100% accurate, whereas 4-year-olds trusted the more accurate informant in all conditions tested. These results suggest that 3-year-olds mistrust informants who make a single error, whereas 4-year-olds track the relative frequency of errors when deciding whom to trust.
The social cognition and perception-action literatures are largely separate, both conceptually and empirically. However, both areas of research emphasize infants' emerging abilities to use available information--social and perceptual information, respectively--for making decisions about action. Borrowing methods from both research traditions, this study examined whether 18-month-old infants incorporate both social and perceptual information in their motor decisions. The infants' task was to determine whether to walk down slopes of varying risk levels as their mothers encouraged or discouraged walking. First, a psychophysical procedure was used to determine slopes that were safe, borderline, and risky for individual infants. Next, during a series of test trials, infants received mothers' advice about whether to walk. Infants used social information selectively: They ignored encouraging advice to walk down risky slopes and discouraging advice to avoid safe slopes, but they deferred to mothers' advice at borderline slopes. Findings indicate that 18-month-old infants correctly weigh competing sources of information when making decisions about motor action and that they rely on social information only when perceptual information is inadequate or uncertain.
One hundred and fifty participants played a computer task in which points were either gained (reinforcement) or lost (punishment) randomly on 75%, 50%, or 25% of trials. Despite the noncontingent nature of the task, participants frequently suggested superstitious rules by which points were either gained or lost. Rules were more likely to be suggested and supported higher confidence ratings under conditions of maximal reinforcement or minimal punishment, and participants gaining points tended to express more rules than did those losing points. Superstitious rule generation was in no way related to a person's locus of control, as measured by Rotter's Internal-External Scale. Participants losing points were more accurate in keeping track of their total number of points than were participants gaining points. Results are discussed in terms of reinforcement and punishment's effects on the stimulus control of rule-governed behavior, and comparisons are drawn with the illusion of control and learned helplessness literature.
The illusion of control can be defined as the erroneous belief that one's actions cause a specific outcome, whereas sense of agency refers to the subjective feeling of authorship over one's actions. In the present study we investigated the development of illusory control and sense of agency. A novel card-guessing game was developed in which 7- to-12-year old children (Study 1) and adults (Study 2) were required to select a card, and we manipulated the congruence of the outcome with their initial choice (i.e. congruent or incongruent) and the valence of the outcome that was presented (i.e. positive or negative). We found that illusory control and the self-attribution bias (i.e. the bias to attribute positive outcomes to oneself) in the card guessing game decreased, as children get older. In contrast, for both children and adults sense of agency in the task was similarly affected by outcome congruency, suggesting that the ability to relate predicted to observed action outcomes reflects a basic mechanism that helps people to sustain a sense of agency. Thus, while the illusion of control decreases as we get older, the experience of agency as a function of outcome congruency seems to be more stable across development.
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Locomotion - moving the body from place to place - is one of infants' greatest achievements. In addition to conquering gravity, infants must cope with variable and novel constraints on balance and propulsion. At the same time that they are learning to move, changes in infants' bodies, skills, and environments change the biomechanical constraints on movement. Recent work highlights both flexibility and specificity in infants' responses to novel and variable situations, demonstrating that infants are learning to learn as they master locomotion. Within sitting, crawling, cruising, and walking postures, experienced infants adapt their locomotor responses to the current biomechanical constraints on movement. However, what infants have learned about coping with variability and novelty in earlier-developing postures does not transfer to later-developing postures.
The illusion of control is the belief that our behavior produces an effect that is actually independent from it. This illusion is often at the core of superstitious and pseudoscientific thinking. Although recent research has proposed several evidence-based strategies that can be used to reduce the illusion, the majority of these experiments have involved positive illusions—that is, those in which the potential outcomes are desired (e.g., recovery from illness or earning points). By contrast, many real-life superstitions and pseudosciences are tied to negative illusions—that is, those in which the potential consequences are undesired. Examples are walking under a ladder, breaking a mirror, or sitting in row 13, all of which are supposed to generate bad luck. Thus, the question is whether the available evidence on how to reduce positive illusions would also apply to situations in which the outcomes are undesired. We conducted an experiment in which participants were exposed to undesired outcomes that occurred independently of their behavior. One strategy that has been shown to reduce positive illusions consists of warning people that the outcomes might have alternative causes, other than the participants’ actions, and telling them that the best they can do to find out whether an alternative cause is at work is to act on only about 50 % of the trials. When we gave our participants this information in an experiment in which the outcomes were undesired, their illusion was enhanced rather than reduced, contrary to what happens when the outcome is desired. This suggests that the strategies that reduce positive illusions may work in just the opposite way when the outcome is undesired.
This review analyzes what is known about how children's judgments of their intellectual competence and their definition and criteria for evaluating competence change with age and experience in achievement contexts. Research documenting an age-related decline in children's average ratings of their intellectual ability is interpreted in terms of developmental changes in children's concept of ability and the criteria they use to evaluate ability. The studies reviewed suggest that children's concept of ability becomes more differentiated with age and that children do not develop a concept of ability as a stable trait until late in elementary school. Research also indicates that the criteria children use to assess intellectual competence shift over the elementary school years-from effort, social reinforcement, and mastery to objective and normative information. Changes in ability assessments are considered in the context of age-related changes in children's cognitive abilities and in the nature of their educational environments.
Abstract— Young children exhibit a positivity bias in their judgment of personality traits, wherein they attend to or process information selectively to maintain optimistic views of the self and others. In addition to its theoretical relevance for developing a cohesive model of personality reasoning, the positivity bias has implications for several aspects of psychosocial well-being (e.g., peer relations, personal safety). Despite its importance and recurrence across many research studies, little attention has been devoted to studying the positivity bias systematically. This article describes 3 lines of research that demonstrate a positivity bias in early personality reasoning and presents arguments for the role of adaptive immaturity and socialization factors in setting the stage for, and perpetuating, the positivity bias. Suggestions for future research center on the need to consider the positivity bias as a profile of personality attribution, to identify the factors that contribute to the bias, and to understand the significance of the bias over the course of development.
Children's attention to knowledge-acquisition events was examined in 4 experiments in which children were taught novel facts and subsequently asked how long they had known the new information. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-olds tended to claim they had known novel animal facts for a long time and also reported that other children would know the novel facts. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, using facts associated with chemistry demonstrations. In Experiments 3 and 4, children were taught new color words. 5-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, distinguished between novel and familiar color words, reporting they had not known the novel words before the test session, but they had always known the familiar words. 4-year-olds in Experiment 4 were better able to distinguish novel and familiar color words when the teaching of the novel words was an explicit and salient part of the procedure.
This study investigated children's ability to comprehend deceptive point gestures. Thirty 3-4 1/2-year-olds participated in a game in which a sticker was hidden under one of two containers. A confederate provided misleading clues about the location of the sticker by either pointing to or placing a marker on the container without the sticker. Across ages, children performed less well when the clue was the point than when it was the marker. They were able to use the misleading marker cue, learning to look under the unmarked container. However, they could not do this for the misleading point. These results concur with those from studies of point production (Carlson, Moses & Hix, 1998) in indicating that deceptive pointing may be a misleading measure of children's abilities. At a very early age children learn the communicative value of the point gesture. This knowledge may become so entrenched that children have difficulty interpreting points in a novel manner.
By 4 years of age, children have been reinforced repeatedly for searching where they see someone point. In two studies, we asked whether this history of reinforcement could interfere with young children's ability to discriminate between a knowledgeable and an ignorant informant. Children watched as one informant hid a sticker while another turned around, and then both informants indicated where they though the sticker was, either by pointing or by using a less practiced means of reference. Children failed to discriminate between the two informants when they pointed, but they chose the location indicated by the knowledgeable informant when the informants used a cue other than pointing. Pointing can disrupt as basic an understanding as the link between seeing and knowing.
Young children have been described as critical consumers of information, particularly in the domain of language learning. Indeed, children are more likely to learn novel words from people with accurate histories of object labeling than with inaccurate ones. But what happens when informant testimony conflicts with a tendency to see the world in a particular way? In impression formation, children exhibit a positivity bias in personality judgments. This study examined whether 3- to 7-year-olds would accept reliable testimony about a stranger's personality that conflicted with a putative positivity bias (i.e., a negative trait attribution). Overall, participants accepted testimony from reliable informants more often than expected by chance, although they were significantly more likely to do so when the information was positive than when it was negative. These findings indicate that in addition to the reliability status of informants, information processing biases have a substantial impact on children's use of informant testimony to learn about the social world.
Across two experiments, preschool-aged children demonstrated selective learning of non-linguistic information from native-accented rather than foreign-accented speakers. In Experiment 1, children saw videos of a native- and a foreign-accented speaker of English who each spoke for 10 seconds, and then silently demonstrated different functions with novel objects. Children selectively endorsed the silent object function provided by the native-accented speaker. In Experiment 2, children again endorsed the native-accented over the foreign-accented speaker, even though both informants previously spoke only in nonsense speech. Thus, young children demonstrate selective trust in native-accented speakers even when neither informant's speech relays meaningful semantic content, and the information that both informants provide is non-linguistic. We propose that children orient towards members of their native community to guide their early cultural learning.
How do children resolve conflicts between a self-generated belief and what they are told? Four studies investigated the circumstances under which toddlers would trust testimony that conflicted with their expectations about the physical world. Thirty-month-olds believed testimony that conflicted with a naive bias (Study 1), and they also repeatedly trusted testimony that conflicted with an event they had just seen (Study 2)-even when they had an incentive to ignore the testimony (Study 3). Children responded more skeptically if they could see that the testimony was wrong as it was being delivered (Study 3), or if they had the opportunity to accumulate evidence confirming their initial belief before hearing someone contradict it (Study 4). Together, these studies demonstrate that toddlers have a robust bias to trust even surprising testimony, but this trust can be influenced by how much confidence they have in their initial belief.
Metacognitions of agency were investigated using a computer task in which X's and O's streamed from the top of a computer screen, and the participants moved the mouse to get the cursor to touch the X's and avoid the O's. After each 15 s trial, participants made judgments of agency and judgments of performance. Objective control was either undistorted, or distorted by (1) Turbulence (i.e., random noise), (2) a Lag between the mouse and cursor movements (of 250 or 500 ms), or (3) 'Magic,' (i.e., an increased radius around the X's for which credit was given). In Experiment 1, college students' judgments of agency showed that they were sensitive to all three manipulations. They also indicated that they felt more in control in the Lag conditions, where there was a rule on which they could potentially capitalize, than in the matched Turbulence conditions. In Experiment 2, older adults were also sensitive to all three manipulations, but less so than the college students. They were not sensitive to the difference between the Lag and Turbulence manipulations. Finally, in Experiment 3, 8-10 year-old children were sensitive to their loss of control equally in the Lag and Turbulence conditions. However, when performance was artificially improved, in the Magic condition, children took full credit and showed no evidence that they realized that the results were due to an external variable. Together, these findings suggest that people's metacognition of agency changes in important ways across the lifespan.
In three experiments (N = 123; 148; 28), children observed a video in which two speakers offered alternative labels for unfamiliar objects. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds endorsed the label given by a speaker who had previously labeled familiar objects accurately, rather than that given by a speaker with a history of inaccurate labeling, even when the inaccurate speaker erred only while blindfolded. In Experiments 2 and 3, 3- to 7-year-olds showed no preference for the label given by a previously inaccurate but blindfolded speaker, over that given by a second inaccurate speaker with no obvious excuse for erring. Children based their endorsements on speakers' history of accuracy or inaccuracy irrespective of the speakers' information access at the time, raising doubts that children made mentalistic interpretations of speakers' inaccuracy.
Children's attention to knowledge-acquisition events was examined in 4 experiments in which children were taught novel facts and subsequently asked how long they had known the new information. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-olds tended to claim they had known novel animal facts for a long time and also reported that other children would know the novel facts. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, using facts associated with chemistry demonstrations. In Experiments 3 and 4, children were taught new color words. 5-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, distinguished between novel and familiar color words, reporting they had not known the novel words before the test session, but they had always known the familiar words. 4-year-olds in Experiment 4 were better able to distinguish novel and familiar color words when the teaching of the novel words was an explicit and salient part of the procedure.
Being able to evaluate the accuracy of an informant is essential to communication. Three experiments explored preschoolers' (N=119) understanding that, in cases of conflict, information from reliable informants is preferable to information from unreliable informants. In Experiment 1, children were presented with previously accurate and inaccurate informants who presented conflicting names for novel objects. 4-year-olds-but not 3-year-olds-predicted whether an informant would be accurate in the future, sought, and endorsed information from the accurate over the inaccurate informant. In Experiment 2, both age groups displayed trust in knowledgeable over ignorant speakers. In Experiment 3, children extended selective trust when learning both verbal and nonverbal information. These experiments demonstrate that preschoolers have a key strategy for assessing the reliability of information.
Two studies investigated 3- to 5-year-olds' trust in a reliable informant when judging novel labels and novel plural and past tense forms. In Study 1, children (N = 24) endorsed the names of new objects given by an informant who had earlier labeled familiar objects correctly over the names given by an informant who had labeled the same objects incorrectly. In Study 2, children (N = 24) endorsed novel names given by an informant who had earlier expressed the plural of familiar nouns correctly over one who had expressed the plural incorrectly. But children overwhelmingly endorsed the regular plural and past tense forms of new words provided by the formerly unreliable labeler (Study 1) or morphologist (Study 2) rather than irregular forms of those words provided by the formerly reliable informant.
Trusting what you're told: How children learn from others
- P L Harris
- J Heckhausen
- R Schulz
Harris, P. L. (2012). Trusting what you're told: How children learn from others. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Heckhausen, J., & Schulz, R. (1995). A life-span theory of control. Psychological Review, 102, 284-304.
- V K Jaswal
- D A Mckercher
- M Vanderborght
Jaswal, V. K., McKercher, D. A., & VanderBorght, M. (2008). Limitations on reliability: Regularity rules in the English plural and
past tense. Child Development, 79, 750-760.