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Learning from multiple informants: Children's response to epistemic bases for consensus judgments
Sunae Kim1, Elizabeth S Spelke2
1Department of Developmental and Clinical Child Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, 1053 Budapest, Hungary.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|January 6, 2020
Summary
Children aged four understand when group agreement, or consensus, is trustworthy. They prefer group judgments over individual ones, but only if the group
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Development
- Social Psychology
- Developmental Psychology
Background:
- Consensus holds both social and epistemic significance.
- Children demonstrate sensitivity to the social value of consensus.
- Prior research indicates children's awareness of social conformity.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether 4-year-old children recognize the epistemic value of consensus.
- To determine if children differentiate between consensus based on observation and individual judgment.
- To explore children's ability to assess the evidential basis of group agreement.
Main Methods:
- Two experiments were conducted with 4-year-old children.
- Participants observed multiple informants agreeing on a judgment versus a single informant.
- The epistemic warrant of the consensus was manipulated in one experiment.
Main Results:
- Children's judgments aligned more with the consensus over a lone individual's judgment.
- This tendency decreased when the consensus was shown to lack evidential support.
- Children demonstrated sensitivity to the reliability of information sources.
Conclusions:
- Young children are sensitive to the epistemic value of consensus.
- Children can assess the evidential basis of group judgments.
- This suggests an early understanding of information reliability in social learning.
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