Investigating Sensitivity to Shared Information and Personal Experience in Children's Use of Majority Information

Children and adults alike rely on others to learn about the world, but also need to be able to determine the strength of both their own evidence as well as the evidence that other people provide, particularly when different sources of information disagree. For example, if two informants agree on a belief but share the same evidence, their testimony is statistically dependent on each other, and may be weaker evidence for that belief than two informants who draw on different pieces of evidence to support that belief. Across three experiments (total N = 492), we examine how 4- and 5-year-old children evaluate statistical dependency on a task where they must determine which of two jars that toys were drawn from. A majority of informants, whose testimony could draw from the same evidence or different evidence, always endorsed one jar. Then, children were presented with a dissenting informant or their own personal data that was consistent with the other jar. Children showed no sensitivity to statistical dependency, choosing the majority with equal probability regardless of the independence of their testimony, but also systematically overweighted their own personal data, endorsing the jar consistent with their own evidence more often than would be predicted by an optimal Bayesian model. In contrast, children made choices consistent with this model on a similar task in which the data was presented to children without testimony. Our findings suggest that young children treat majorities as broadly informative, but that the challenges of inferring others' experiences may lead them to rely on concrete, visible evidence when it is available.