Exploring information use in children's decision-making: Base-rate neglect and trust in testimony

Classic literature in judgment and decision-making shows that when testimony information conflicts with base-rates, adults typically underuse base-rate information and rely heavily on testimony (Bar-Hillel, 1980; Lyon & Slovic, 1976; Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). Although children can use base-rates (Denison, Konopczynski, Garcia, & Xu, 2006; Kushnir, Xu, & Wellman, 2010) and testimony (Koenig & Harris, 2005) separately in their inferences, whether they show a similar tendency toward weighing testimony more heavily is unknown. Four- and 5-year-old children were asked to guess the color of a dog's collar, drawn from a group of 10 dogs (e.g., 8 blue: 2 yellow). Children were also presented with testimony about the dog's collar that was from either a previously accurate or inaccurate witness. In Experiment 1 (N = 120), children were presented with only base-rate or testimony information. They relied on base-rates at above chance levels and relied on testimony at rates that approximately matched the witness's previous accuracy. In Experiment 2 (N = 160), when base-rates and testimony were presented together and conflicted, a majority of children endorsed the color consistent with the accurate witness's testimony, neglecting base-rates. However, when presented with the inaccurate witness's testimony, children were more likely to endorse the color indicated by the base-rates. Children appear to rely on the testimony of an accurate but fallible witness, revealing that a tendency to neglect base-rates in favor of testimony emerges early in development, yet they remain sensitive to the witness's accuracy when presented with multiple sources of information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).