Trust in Testimony: Children's Use of True and False Statements

By Melissa Koenig, F. Clément, Paul L. Harris. Psychology Science, 2004

637 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The extent to which young children monitor and use the truth of assertions to gauge the reliability of subsequent testimony was examined. Three- and 4-year-old children were presented with two informants, an accurate labeler and an inaccurate labeler. They were then invited to learn names for novel objects from these informants. The children correctly monitored and identified the informants on the basis of the truth of their prior labeling. Furthermore, children who explicitly identified the unreliable or reliable informant across two tasks went on to demonstrate selective trust in the novel information provided by the previously reliable informant. Children who did not consistently identify the unreliable or reliable informant proved indiscriminate.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e9de7a2326e80ff62ed87a26d5dd79af204d3ca5

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Learning from others: children's construction of concepts. (2009, background): “Notably, there are key contexts in which the child hears a word in the direct presence of its referent but fails to learn it: when the speaker is looking elsewhere from where the child is looking (Baldwin 1991); when the speaker has proven to be unreliable in prior naming instances (Koenig et al. 20”
The Emergence of Scientific Reasoning (2012, background): “Kuhn (2011b) recently examined how to facilitate reasoning about multivariable causality, and the problems associated with the visualization of outcomes resulting from multiple causes (e.”
The Basis of Epistemic Trust: Reliable Testimony or Reliable Sources? (2007, background): “Such age differences have been found in a host of previous experiments that presented children with consistently accurate and inaccurate informants (Clément, Koenig & Harris 2004, Experiments 1 & 2; Koenig et al. 2004; Koenig & Harris 2005, Experiment 1).”
How to learn about teaching: An evolutionary framework for the study of teaching behavior in humans and other animals. (2014, background): “…that 4-year-olds are capable of distinguishing teacher quality by tracking model accuracies, as well as preferring previously accurate models (Koenig et al. 2004) and knowledgeable models (Koenig & Harris 2005; Sabbagh & Baldwin 2001), and generally preferring accurate models when learning…”
Turning Believers into Skeptics: 3-Year-Olds' Sensitivity to Cues to Speaker Credibility (2007, result): “After all, previous work has shown that even infants are sensitive to a speaker’s visual attention (e.g., Baldwin, 1991, 1993) and that preschoolers are sensitive to a speaker’s history of accuracy in naming (e.g., Koenig et al., 2004).”
Young children's selective learning of rule games from reliable and unreliable models (2009, result): “(3) Novel label trials The structure of these novel label trials was slightly different from the procedure used by Koenig et al. (2004) and others and more structurally analogous to the novel game trials.”
To Trust or not to Trust? Children’s Social Epistemology (2010, methodology): “, saying «It’s a banana» when looking at an apple) (Clément et al. 2004; Koenig et al. 2004).”
Looks Aren't Everything: 24-Month-Olds' Willingness to Accept Unexpected Labels (2007, background): “Recent work by Koenig, Clement, and Harris (2004) has shown that older children will discount information from an adult who has been unreliable in the past.”
Preschoolers mistrust ignorant and inaccurate speakers. (2005, background): “Thus, in line with prior findings (Clément et al., 2004; Koenig et al., 2004), we expected that 4-year-olds would pick out the inaccurate speaker on explicit judgment trials, predict the differential responses of the two informants on prediction trials, and accept information from the reliable infor”
Whom do children copy? Model-based biases in social learning (2013, background): “When three- to five-year-old children were given conflicting artefact labels and functions from a known or unknown teacher they copied the known teacher when no further information was provided (Corriveau & Harris, 2009b).”