The Quest for Truth: Experimenter Identity Impacts Children's Response to Surprising Information

Much of what children know about the world is learned from information provided by others, and children's endorsement of this information depends on the social attributes of the person providing the information (e.g., their accent, attractiveness, etc.). Previous work on how the identity of a person providing information (i.e., informant) influences children's learning has tended to focus on a highly specific, simplified learning context, where children are provided with conflicting claims from two individuals (e.g., one foreign- and one locally accented speaker) and are immediately asked to indicate whose information they endorse more. In the current study, we investigated the effect of informant identity on 5- to 7-year-old children's (N = 144) learning in a more real-world context, where children encountered surprising information from only one person (a foreign- or locally accented speaker), and were subsequently given the opportunity to engage further with that information (by testing for themselves whether the information was true). In contrast to previous research using a forced choice method, almost all children initially endorsed the surprising claim; however, their subsequent testing of the claim and later endorsement did differ based on whether children were interacting with a foreign- or locally accented speaker. These results highlight the need to investigate the influence of social factors on selective learning in more ecologically valid contexts, which, importantly, consider the influence of an informant at multiple points throughout the learning process.