Young children heed advice selectively

Preferences for advisor agreement and accuracy

Previous research has shown that people are more influenced by advisors who are objectively more accurate, but also by advisors who tend to agree with their own initial opinions. The present experiments extend these ideas to consider people's choices of who they receive advice from-the process of source selection. Across a series of nine experiments, participants were first exposed to advisors who differed in objective accuracy, the likelihood of agreeing with the participants' judgments, or both, and then were given choice over who would advise them across a series of decisions. Participants saw these advisors in the context of perceptual decision and general knowledge tasks, sometimes with feedback provided and sometimes without. We found evidence that people can discern accurate from inaccurate advice even in the absence of feedback, but that without feedback they are biased to select advisors who tend to agree with them. When choosing between advisors who are accurate vs. likely to agree with them, participants overwhelmingly choose accurate advisors when feedback is available, but show wide individual differences in preference when feedback is absent. These findings extend previous studies of advice influence to characterise patterns of advisor choice, with implications for how people select information sources and learn accordingly.

The role of accuracy in children's judgments of experts' knowledge

Across two studies, children ages 6-9 (N = 160, 82 boys, 78 girls; 75% White, 91% non-Hispanic) rated an inaccurate expert's knowledge and provided explanations for the expert's inaccurate statements. In Study 1, children's knowledge ratings decreased as he provided more inaccurate information. Ratings were predicted by age (i.e., older children gave lower ratings than younger children) and how children explained the error. Children's ratings followed similar patterns in Study 2. However, children delegated new questions to the inaccurate expert, even after rating him as having little to no knowledge. These results suggest that 6- to 9-year-olds weigh accuracy over expertise when making epistemic judgments, but, when they need assistance, they will still seek out information from a previously inaccurate expert.

A meta-analysis of the weight of advice in decision-making

The degree to which people take advice, and the factors that influence advice-taking, are of broad interest to laypersons, professionals, and policy-makers. This meta-analysis on 346 effect sizes from 129 independent datasets (N = 17, 296) assessed the weight of advice in the judge-advisor system paradigm, as well as the influence of sample and task characteristics. Information about the advisor(s) that is suggestive of advice quality was the only unique predictor of the overall pooled weight of advice. Individuals adjusted estimates by 32%, 37%, and 48% in response to advisors described in ways that suggest low, neutral, or high quality advice, respectively. This indicates that the benefits of compromise and averaging may be lost if accurate advice is perceived to be low quality, or too much weight is given to inaccurate advice that is perceived to be high quality. When examining the three levels of perceived quality separately, advice-taking was greater for subjective and uncertain estimates, relative to objective estimates, when information about the advisor was neutral in terms of advice quality. Sample characteristics had no effect on advice-taking, thus providing no evidence that age, gender, or individualism influence the weight of advice. The findings contribute to current theoretical debates and provide direction for future research.

I'm not a little kid anymore! Reciprocal social influence in child-adult interaction

Human decisions are often influenced by others' opinions. This process is regulated by social norms: for instance, we tend to reciprocate the consideration received from others, independently of their reliability as information sources. Nonetheless, no study to date has investigated whether and how reciprocity modulates social influence in child-adult interaction. We tested 6-, 8- and 10-year-old children in a novel joint perceptual task. A child and an adult experimenter made perceptual estimates and then took turns in making a final decision, choosing between their own and partner's response. We manipulated the final choices of the adult partner, who in one condition chose often the child's estimates, whereas in another condition tended to confirm her own response. Results reveal that 10-year-old children reciprocated the consideration received from the partner, increasing their level of conformity to the adult's judgements when the partner had shown high consideration towards them. At the same time, 10-year-old children employed more elaborate decision criteria in choosing when trusting the adult partner compared to younger children and did not show egocentric biases in their final decisions. Our results shed light on the development of the cognitive and normative mechanisms modulating reciprocal social influence in child-adult interaction.

The Relationship Between Confidence and Conformity in a Non-routine Counting Task With Young Children: Dedicated to the Memory of Purificación Rodríguez

Counting is a complex cognitive process that is paramount to arithmetical development at school. The improvement of counting skills of children depends on their understanding of the logical and conventional rules involved. While the logical rules are mandatory and related to one-to-one correspondence, stable order, and cardinal principles, conventional rules are optional and associated with social customs. This study contributes to unravel the conceptual understanding of counting rules of children. It explores, with a developmental approach, the performance of children on non-routine counting detection tasks, their confidence in their answers (metacognitive monitoring skills), and their ability to change a wrong answer by deferring to the opinion of a unanimous majority who justified or did not justify their claims. Hundred and forty nine children aged from 5 to 8 years were randomized to one of the experimental conditions of the testimony of teachers: with (n = 74) or without justification (n = 75). Participants judged the correctness of different types of counting procedures presented by a computerized detection task, such as (a) pseudoerrors that are correct counts where conventional rules are violated (e.g., first counting six footballs, followed by other six basketballs that were interspersed along the row), and (b) compensation errors that are incorrect counts where logical rules were broken twice (e.g., skipping the third element of the row and then labeling the sixth element with two number words, 5 and 6). Afterwards, children rated their confidence in their detection answer with a 5-point scale. Subsequently, they listened to the testimony of the teachers and showed either conformity or non-conformity. The participants considered both compensation errors and pseudoerrors as incorrect counts in the detection task. The analysis of the confidence of children in their responses suggested that they were not sensitive to their incorrect performance. Finally, children tended to conform more often after hearing a justification of the testimony than after hearing only the testimonies of the teachers. It can be concluded that the age range of the evaluated children failed to recognize the optional nature of conventional counting rules and were unaware of their misconceptions. Nevertheless, the reasoned justifications of the testimony, offered by a unanimous majority, promoted considerable improvement in the tendency of the children to revise those misconceptions.

CONFIANÇA SELETIVA EM CRIANÇAS PRÉ-ESCOLARES: UMA REVISÃO SISTEMÁTICA

Embora o campo de estudos sobre confiança seletiva tenha ganhado destaque nos últimos anos, essa linha de pesquisa não é ainda suficientemente divulgada no Brasil. A presente revisão sistemática teve como objetivo avaliar a produção científica sobre confiança seletiva em crianças pré-escolares, bem como sobre possíveis variáveis que influenciam os julgamentos de confiança. A busca foi realizada nas bases de dados PSYCINFO, Scielo Brasil, PEPSIC e LILACS, utilizando-se as palavras-chave selective trust, epistemic trust e seus correspondentes em português ‘confiança seletiva’ e ‘confiança epistêmica’. De um total de 103 trabalhos, foram analisados 45 artigos empíricos, publicados entre 2008 e 2018, seguindo o protocolo PRISMA. Contrariando uma crença predominante em muitas culturas de que as crianças acreditam em tudo o que ouvem, elas não são consumidoras ingênuas de informação. Discutem-se os efeitos de variáveis individuais e contextuais sobre os julgamentos de confiança seletiva que apontam para direções futuras promissoras de pesquisa.

Children’s learning from others: Conformity to unconventional counting

The current study investigated whether children’s conformity to a majority testimony influenced their willingness to revise their own erroneous counting knowledge. The content of the testimonies focused on conventional rules of counting, by means of pseudoerrors (i.e., unconventional counts) occurring during a detection task. In this work measurements were taken at two different time points. At time 1 children aged 5 to 7 years ( N = 88) first made independent judgments on the correctness of unconventional counting procedures presented by means of a computerized detection task. Subsequently, they watched a video in which four teachers (unanimous majority) or three (non-unanimous majority) made correct claims about the counts and children had to decide whether the informants were right or not, and justify their answers. Our participants conformed significantly more when the correct testimony was provided by a unanimous majority than by a non-unanimous majority. In addition, in two of the three pseudoerrors presented, there was no difference in the children’s tendency to conform to unconventional counts as age increased. At time 2, which was taken to test whether the effect of the testimony was maintained over time, the responses of the 32 children (16 from each age group) who had endorsed the claims of the unanimous majority at time 1 revealed that teachers’ testimonies only had a lasting influence on elementary school children’s understanding of conventional counting rules.

Developmental trajectory of social influence integration into perceptual decisions in children

The opinions of others have a profound influence on decision making in adults. The impact of social influence appears to change during childhood, but the underlying mechanisms and their development remain unclear. We tested 125 neurotypical children between the ages of 6 and 14 years on a perceptual decision task about 3D-motion figures under informational social influence. In these children, a systematic bias in favor of the response of another person emerged at around 12 years of age, regardless of whether the other person was an age-matched peer or an adult. Drift diffusion modeling indicated that this social influence effect in neurotypical children was due to changes in the integration of sensory information, rather than solely a change in decision behavior. When we tested a smaller cohort of 30 age- and IQ-matched autistic children on the same task, we found some early decision bias to social influence, but no evidence for the development of systematic integration of social influence into sensory processing for any age group. Our results suggest that by the early teens, typical neurodevelopment allows social influence to systematically bias perceptual processes in a visual task previously linked to the dorsal visual stream. That the same bias did not appear to emerge in autistic adolescents in this study may explain some of their difficulties in social interactions.

Children’s Judgments of Epistemic and Moral Agents: From Situations to Intentions

Children’s evaluations of moral and epistemic agents crucially depend on their discerning that an agent’s actions were performed intentionally. Here we argue that children’s epistemic and moral judgments reveal practices of forgiveness and blame, trust and mistrust, and objection or disapproval and that such practices are supported by children’s monitoring of the situational constraints on agents. Inherent in such practices is the understanding that agents are responsible for actions performed under certain conditions but not others. We discuss a range of situational constraints on children’s early epistemic and moral evaluations and clarify how these situational constraints serve to support children’s identification of intentional actions. By monitoring the situation, children distinguish intentional from less intentional action and selectively hold epistemic and moral agents accountable. We argue that these findings inform psychological and philosophical theorizing about attributions of moral and epistemic agency and responsibility.

The Development of Selective Copying: Children's Learning From an Expert Versus Their Mother

This study tested the prediction that, with age, children should rely less on familiarity and more on expertise in their selective social learning. Experiment 1 (N = 50) found that 5- to 6-year-olds copied the technique their mother used to extract a prize from a novel puzzle box, in preference to both a stranger and an established expert. This bias occurred despite children acknowledging the expert model's superior capability. Experiment 2 (N = 50) demonstrated a shift in 7- to 8-year-olds toward copying the expert. Children aged 9-10 years did not copy according to a model bias. The findings of a follow-up study (N = 30) confirmed that, instead, they prioritized their own-partially flawed-causal understanding of the puzzle box.

Social conformity persists at least one day in 6-year-old children

Humans have a tendency to forgo their own attitudes or beliefs in order to better align with the interests of a majority, a behavioral process known as conformity. Social conformity has been widely studied among adults and adolescents, whereas experimental studies on the impact of peer influence among young children have been relatively limited. The current study aims to investigate both short-term and sustained conforming behaviors among children in situations of relatively low social pressure. Forty-one children aged 5 to 6 years rated the attractiveness of 90 faces presented serially followed by witnessing a group rating in the absence of peers. Subsequently, second judgement was made after 30 minutes (Experiment 1). Results show that 6-year-old children tended to conform to their peers when group ratings differed from their own ratings, while younger children did not. In Experiment 2, children were required to make the second judgment one day after exposure to group ratings. Similarly, children aged 6 years exhibited a sustained conformity effect even after one day. Our findings suggest that 6-year-old children spontaneously change their private opinions under implicit social influence from peers.