Visual access trumps gender in 3- and 4-year-old children’s endorsement of testimony

Several studies have investigated how preschoolers weigh social cues against epistemic cues when taking testimony into account. For instance, one study showed that 4- and 5-year-olds preferred to endorse the testimony of an informant who had the same gender as the children; by contrast, when the gen...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental child psychology 2016-06, Vol.146, p.223-230
Main Authors: Terrier, Nathalie, Bernard, Stéphane, Mercier, Hugo, Clément, Fabrice
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Child development
Child, Preschool
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive science
Cues
Epistemology
Female
Gender
Humans
Judgment
Male
Preschool children
Preschoolers
Reproducibility of Results
Sex Factors
Social Behavior
Social cognition
Stimuli
Testimony
Testimony selection
Trust
Trust - psychology
Visual access
Visual Perception
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Summary:Several studies have investigated how preschoolers weigh social cues against epistemic cues when taking testimony into account. For instance, one study showed that 4- and 5-year-olds preferred to endorse the testimony of an informant who had the same gender as the children; by contrast, when the gender cue conflicted with an epistemic cue—past reliability—the latter trumped the former. None of the previous studies, however, has shown that 3-year-olds can prioritize an epistemic cue over a social cue. In Experiment 1, we offer the first demonstration that 3-year-olds favor testimony from a same-gender informant in the absence of other cues. In Experiments 2 and 3, an epistemic cue—visual access—was introduced. In those experiments, 3- and 4-year-olds endorsed the testimony of the informant with visual access regardless of whether it was a same-gender informant (Experiment 3) or a different-gender informant (Experiment 2). These results demonstrate that 3-year-olds are able to give more weight to an epistemic cue than to a social cue when evaluating testimony.
ISSN:0022-0965
1096-0457
DOI:10.1016/j.jecp.2016.02.002