Trusting What You’re Told

By Paul L. Harris. 2012

460 citations recorded by the source corpus.

If children were little scientists who learn best through firsthand observations and mini-experiments, as conventional wisdom holds, how would a child discover that the earth is round - never mind conceive of heaven as a place someone might go after death? Overturning both cognitive and commonplace theories about how children learn, "Trusting What You're Told" begins by reminding us of a basic truth: Most of what we know we learned from others. Children recognize early on that other people are an excellent source of information. And so they ask questions. But youngsters are also remarkably discriminating as they weigh the responses they elicit. And how much they trust what they are told has a lot to do with their assessment of its source. "Trusting What You're Told" opens a window into the moral reasoning of elementary school vegetarians, the preschooler's ability to distinguish historical narrative from fiction, and the six-year-old's nuanced stance toward magic: skeptical, while still open to miracles. Paul Harris shares striking cross-cultural findings, too, such as that children in religious communities in rural Central America resemble Bostonian children in being more confident about the existence of germs and oxygen than they are about souls and God. We are biologically designed to learn from one another, Harris demonstrates, and this greediness for explanation marks a key difference between human beings and our primate cousins. Even Kanzi, a genius among bonobos, never uses his keyboard to ask for information: he only asks for treats.

Subfields: Education

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Citations in the corpus

The burden of proof for a cultural group selection account (2014, background): “Business organizations have been a focus of social identity research and research on the impact of social identity on organization performance (Ashforth, Harrison, & Corley, 2008). New employees acquire the firm’s culture through formal and informal socialization and incorporate the firm’s culture a”
Question-asking in childhood: A review of the literature and a framework for understanding its development (2018, background): “An intrinsic part of a question is that it builds on some conceptual starting point (Graesser & Olde, 2003; Harris, 2012).”
Understanding and Promoting Thinking About Knowledge (2016, background): “It is based on basic evaluations of trustworthiness referring to features such as the accuracy, competence, coherence, audience reception, and benevolence of sources (Clément, 2016; Harris, 2012).”
The Ontogeny of Cultural Learning. (2016, background): “…ends or at the mysteries of the natural world; children ply their caregivers with questions about the particular cultural world they live in—for example, they ask about puzzling interchanges involving money, the milking of cows but not pigs, and the fate of loved ones when they die (Harris, 2012).”