Children’s Evaluations of Informants and their Surprising Claims in Direct and Overheard Contexts

ABSTRACT

Children are known to accept communicated information, even when it contradicts their own judgments. Here, we explored the role of direct address and accuracy in children’s testimonial decisions and socio-moral evaluations of the speaker. After 4-year-old children (N = 100) gave baseline classification responses for four hybrid animals, an adult speaker either directly told the child information that was in conflict with children’s original judgment, or communicated the same information to a third party over the phone. Children accepted new information in both contexts but were more receptive to surprising claims when the information was communicated to them directly than when it was overheard. Once children learned about the accuracy of the testimony they received, their subsequent socio-moral decisions to reciprocate and share information with the speaker were influenced by the accuracy of the speaker’s testimony, and not by the manner of address.

Acknowledgments

We thank the parents and children for their participation. We also thank Kevin Ly, Nicholas Mattson, Noa Singer and Daiqing Zhao for help with data collection and coding. Finally, we wish to thank Benjamin McMyler for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at DOI:10.17605/OSF.IO/TPA6U.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/gnpku and https://osf.io/gnpku/.

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data and Open Materials. The materials are openly accessible at DOI:10.17605/OSF.IO/TPA6U.

Notes

¹ If child protested after E2 finished a sentence, in the directed condition, E2 would look at the child and wait for her/him to finish speaking, and then continue to follow the script. To keep the conditions consistent, E2 would also pause if the child said something in the overheard condition, but she never looked at the child, and acted as if she was still on the phone. If the child interrupted E2 mid-sentence, E2 would continue to speak in both the directed and overheard conditions.