Selective Social Belief Revision in Young Children

ABSTRACT

Recent research has shown that from early in development, children selectively form new beliefs in response to information supplied by others. However, little is known about the development of selective revision of existing beliefs in response to socially conveyed information. Such selective social belief revision has been extensively studied by social psychologists in the context of advice-taking. Here, we adapted the methods of this research tradition for studying selective advice-taking in young children and adults. Participants solved a perceptual judgment task, received advice, and subsequently made final decisions. The informational access (perceptual quality) of participants and advisor were experimentally manipulated. Adults revised their judgments systematically as a function of both their own and the advisor’s informational access whereas children based their adjustments only on their own informational access. Two follow-up experiments suggest, however, that this pattern of results in children reflected performance rather than competence limitations: In suitably modified tasks, children did proficiently consider both their own informational situation and that of the advisor in their selective social belief revision.

Acknowledgments

We thank Marlen Kaufmann and Konstanze Schirmer for recruitment of participants and Christin Drescher, Josefine Johannsen, Maren Mette, Marika Reimer, Teresa Illner, Isabel Ganter, Marieke Wübner and Sari Siska for assisting in data collection. We are thankful to all participants and parents for their help. The work was supported by the German Science Foundation grant for the Research Training Group 2070 „Understanding Social Relationships“.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ In the present design, it was conceptually impossible to implement a high-high condition because the advice consisted of random judgments to ensure comparable differences between initial estimates and advice in all conditions. While such differences are highly plausible whenever at least one of the two judgments is based on poor visibility, the same is not true when both judge and advisor have good visibility of the stimulus. Here, participants would expect the advisor to make a similar judgment. Frequent violations of this expectation could result in participants losing trust in the advisors’ perceptual reliability or the credibility of the experimental set-up.

² Three of these children did participate in the initial visibility and certainty ratings for which their data were entered into the corresponding analyses (see below).

³ For details about additional measures administered in the test session of Study 1 that were not in the main focus and are thus not reported in the main text, see the Supplementary Online Material.

⁴ Since the advice was determined by a random generator, it sometimes happened that it matched children’s initial judgment by coincidence. In these cases, when children retained their initial judgment, a trial could thus not be classified as “advice-taking” even though children went along with what the advisor had said. In the main analysis, we kept these cases and treated them conservatively as “no advice-taking”. This happened in 17% of the trials of the poor-poor condition, in 16% of the poor-high, and in 3% of the high-poor condition. Excluding these cases would not alter the main analysis, or it would even make the effects stronger (since relatively more cases would be excluded in the poor-high than in the high-poor condition, relative advice-taking in the remaining sample would increase more in poor-high than in high-poor, increasing the difference between the two).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG (German Science Foundation), Research Training Group 2070 “Understanding social relations”.