Learning From "Thinkers": Parent Epistemological Understanding Predicts Individual Differences in Children's...

Four-, 5-, and 6-year olds (N = 102) observed agents perform a reasoning task that required gathering hidden evidence. An agent who made sound inferences was contrasted with an agent who made either unsound inferences (UI; failed to base conclusion on gathered evidence) or guesses (failed to gather evidence). Four-year olds attributed knowledge to all agents and endorsed their conclusions widely. However, 5- and 6-year olds' knowledge attributions were mitigated by UI, and 6-year olds neither attributed knowledge to a guesser nor endorsed his conclusions. Notably, parents' tendency to make evaluativist epistemological judgments-which place value in evidence as a basis for belief-predicted children's reluctance to learn from and credit knowledge to poor reasoners. Parents' evaluativist judgments also predicted children's selective learning about object functions.