Children's selective trust: When a group majority is confronted with past accuracy.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Development
• Social Learning
• Epistemology

Background:

• Young children evaluate informant accuracy to guide trust.
• Children often defer to information from a consensus.
• Non-epistemic factors also influence children's trust decisions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate children's selective trust in informants versus consensus.
• To examine how public accuracy information influences trust in dissenters.
• To assess children's preference for confident versus hesitant informants.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments tested 3- to 5-year-old children's information-seeking and acceptance preferences.
• Children observed adult accuracy with novel animal names.
• Test phases involved choosing between informant and majority-proposed names.

Main Results:

• Children preferred an accurate dissenter over a majority when accuracy was highlighted.
• Children preferred a majority over an inaccurate dissenter.
• Children favored a confident informant over a hesitant one, and a majority over a confident but less-informed informant.

Conclusions:

• Children's trust is sensitive to public accuracy information, influencing preference for dissenters.
• Majority influence can override individual informant accuracy when public accuracy is not emphasized.
• Confidence is a key factor in children's informant preference.