Children's susceptibility to online misinformation

Children have a reputation for credulity that is undeserved; even preschoolers have proven adept at identifying implausible claims and unreliable informants. Still, the strategies children use to identify and reject dubious information are often superficial, which leaves them vulnerable to accepting such information if conveyed through seemingly authoritative channels or formatted in seemingly authentic ways. Indeed, children of all ages have difficulty differentiating legitimate websites and news stories from illegitimate ones, as they are misled by the inclusion of outwardly professional features such as graphs, statistics, and journalistic layout. Children may not be inherently credulous, but their skepticism toward dubious information is often shallow enough to be overridden by the deceptive trappings of online misinformation.

Deriving Features of Religions in the Wild : How Communication and Threat-Detection May Predict Spirits, Gods, Witches, and Shamans

Religions "in the wild" are the varied set of religious activities that occurred before the emergence of organized religions with doctrines, or that persist at the margins of those organized traditions. These religious activities mostly focus on misfortune; on how to remedy specific cases of illness, accidents, failures; and on how to prevent them. I present a general model to account for the cross-cultural recurrence of these particular themes. The model is based on (independently established) features of human psychology-namely, (a) epistemic vigilance, the set of systems whereby we evaluate the quality of information and of sources of information, and (b) threat-detection psychology, the set of evolved systems geared at detecting potential danger in the environment. Given these two sets of systems, the dynamics of communication will favor particular types of messages about misfortune. This makes it possible to predict recurrent features of religious systems, such as the focus on nonphysical agents, the focus on particular cases rather than general aspects of misfortune, and the emergence of specialists. The model could illuminate not just why such representations are culturally successful, but also why people are motivated to formulate them in the first place.

Distinct signatures of subjective confidence and objective accuracy in speech prosody

Whether speech prosody truly and naturally reflects a speaker's subjective confidence, rather than other dimensions such as objective accuracy, is unclear. Here, using a new approach combing psychophysics with acoustic analysis and automatic classification of verbal reports, we tease apart the contributions of sensory evidence, accuracy, and subjective confidence to speech prosody. We find that subjective confidence and objective accuracy are distinctly reflected in the loudness, duration and intonation of verbal reports. Strikingly, we show that a speaker's accuracy is encoded in speech prosody beyond their own metacognitive awareness, and that it can be automatically decoded from this information alone with performances up to 60%. These findings demonstrate that confidence and accuracy have separable prosodic signatures that are manifested with different timings, and on different acoustic dimensions. Thus, both subjective mental states of confidence, and objective states related to competence, can be directly inferred from this natural behavior.

Learning from multiple informants: Children's response to epistemic bases for consensus judgments

Consensus has both social and epistemic value. Children conform to consensus judgments in ways that suggest they are sensitive to the social value of consensus. Here we report two experiments providing evidence that 4-year-old children also are sensitive to the epistemic value of consensus. When multiple informants gave the same judgment concerning the hidden contents of a container, based on the observation of one of their members, children's own judgments tended to align with the consensus judgment over the judgment of a lone character, whose observation received no endorsements. This tendency was reduced, however, when children were shown that the group consensus lacked epistemic warrant. Together, the findings provide evidence that young children are sensitive to the epistemic basis of consensus reports.

Trait or testimony? Children's preferences for positive informants

Research indicates that children often show a positivity bias, or a tendency to favor positive information over negative information, in assessments of informant credibility in social and nonsocial situations. The current study investigated whether young children prioritize positive informant traits (i.e., nice vs. mean informant) as compared with positive speech content (i.e., positive vs. negative evaluation) in conflicting assessments of a work product. A total of 123 4- to 8-year-olds heard stories about a nice informant who gave a negative evaluation of a painting and a mean informant who gave a positive evaluation of the painting. Participants were asked who they would endorse, who they would ask about a future painting, and their friendship preferences. Children endorsed and asked the mean informant who provided positive testimony, but they chose to befriend the nice informant who provided negative testimony. Endorsements of positive testimony increased with age. Findings are considered in the context of the broader literature on selective social learning and trait understanding.

Children's evaluation of verified and unverified claims

Critical to children's learning is the ability to judiciously select what information to accept-to use as the basis for learning and inference-and what information to reject. This becomes especially difficult in a world increasingly inundated with information, where children must carefully reason about the process by which claims are made in order to acquire accurate knowledge. In two experiments, we investigated whether 3- to 7-year-old children (N = 120) understand that factual claims based on verified evidence are more acceptable than claims that have not been sufficiently verified. We found that even at preschool age, children evaluated verified claims as more acceptable than insufficiently verified claims, and that the extent to which they did so was related to their explicit understanding, as evident in their explanations of why those claims were more or less acceptable. These experiments lay the groundwork for an important line of research studying the roots and development of this foundational critical thinking skill.

Early testimonial learning: monitoring speech acts and speakers

Testimony provides children with a rich source of knowledge about the world and the people in it. However, testimony is not guaranteed to be veridical, and speakers vary greatly in both knowledge and intent. In this chapter, we argue that children encounter two primary types of conflicts when learning from speakers: conflicts of knowledge and conflicts of interest. We review recent research on children's selective trust in testimony and propose two distinct mechanisms supporting early epistemic vigilance in response to the conflicts associated with speakers. The first section of the chapter focuses on the mechanism of coherence checking, which occurs during the process of message comprehension and facilitates children's comparison of information communicated through testimony to their prior knowledge, alerting them to inaccurate, inconsistent, irrational, and implausible messages. The second section focuses on source-monitoring processes. When children lack relevant prior knowledge with which to evaluate testimonial messages, they monitor speakers themselves for evidence of competence and morality, attending to cues such as confidence, consensus, access to information, prosocial and antisocial behavior, and group membership.