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Category: Project

Description: Children have a powerful ability to track probabilistic information in their environments, but there are also situations in which young learners simply follow what another person says or does at the cost of obtaining rewards. This latter phenomenon, sometimes termed bias to trust in testimony, has primarily been studied in children pre-school age and younger, presumably because children’s reasoning capacities improve with age. Less attention has been paid to situations in which testimony bias might linger—one possibility is that children may revert to a testimony bias under conditions of uncertainty. Here, participants (4-9-years-old) searched for rewards and received testimony that varied in reliability. In Experiments 1 (N=102; 59M, 43F; participants indicated race and/or ethnicity: 9 Hispanic, 93 not Hispanic; 6 Black or African American, 7 Asian American, 8 multiracial, 77 White, 4 “other”) and 3 (N=129; 68M, 61F; 12 Hispanic, 117 not Hispanic; 10 Black or African American, 4 Asian American, 9 multiracial, 103 White, 3 “other”), we find support for the testimony bias beyond the preschool years, particularly when the testimony’s reliability is uncertain. Though, younger children are disproportionally impacted. These effects are specific to the testimony coming from another person as opposed to being the result of a computer glitch (Experiment 2, N=89; 52M, 37F; 5 Hispanic, 80 not Hispanic; 1 Black or African American, Asian American, 15 multiracial, 66 White, 4 “other”). Taken together, these experiments provide evidence of a disproportionate influence of testimony, even in children with more advanced reasoning skills.