As adults, we might understand that beliefs often spread because people are strongly influenced by their friends, family, and other social connections. However, do we think those influences are strong enough to overrule direct evidence of a friend's unreliability? And do preschoolers expect people to show such biases toward friends and to…

Four studies using a computerized paradigm investigated whether children's imitation performance is content-specific and to what extent dependent on other cognitive processes such as trial-and-error learning, recall, and observational learning. Experiment 1 showed that 3-year-olds could successfully imitate what we call novel cognitive rules…