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Informants' Traits Weigh Heavily in Young Children's Trust in Testimony and in Their Epistemic Inferences
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Lane, Jonathan D.; Wellman, Henry M.; Gelman, Susan A. – Child Development, 2013
This study examined how informants' traits affect how children seek information, trust testimony, and make inferences about informants' knowledge. Eighty-one 3- to 6-year-olds and 26 adults completed tasks where they requested and endorsed information provided by one of two informants with conflicting traits (e.g., honesty vs. dishonesty).…
Descriptors: Epistemology, Access to Information, Inferences, Trust (Psychology)
Preschoolers' Search for Explanatory Information within Adult-Child Conversation
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Frazier, Brandy N.; Gelman, Susan A.; Wellman, Henry M. – Child Development, 2009
This research examined children's questions and the reactions to the answers they receive in conversations with adults. If children actively seek explanatory knowledge, they should react differently depending on whether they receive a causal explanation. Study 1 examined conversations following 6 preschoolers' (ages 2-4 years) causal questions in…
Descriptors: Speech Communication, Child Language, Adults, Children
Categories Influence Predictions about Individual Consistency
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Rhodes, Marjorie; Gelman, Susan A. – Child Development, 2008
Predicting how people will behave in the future is a critical social-cognitive task. In four studies (N = 150, ages preschool to adult), young children (ages 4-5) used category information to guide their expectations about individual consistency. They predicted that psychological properties (preferences and fears) would remain consistent over time…
Descriptors: Prediction, Cognitive Processes, Psychological Patterns, Child Development