Understanding the value of telescopic testimony: With age, a predominantly White Midwestern sample of children credits knowledge to speakers whose statements go beyond the evidence.

One primary value of testimony lies in its ability to extend our powers of observation. Do children credit more knowledge to speakers whose testimony goes beyond firsthand observation? The current study investigated 3- to 8-year-old children's (N = 180) and adults' (N = 20) knowledge attributions to speakers who made claims regarding perceptually evident features of a novel animal (e.g., "is brown") or claims regarding perceptually absent features (e.g., "eats insects"). By 7 years of age, children and adults attributed more knowledge to speakers who discussed telescopic information and generalized their knowledge to other domains. Because the knowledge base of child listeners expands with age, they place increased value on telescopic information and the speakers who provide it.

Greasing (small) palms: Early rejection of bribery.

We tested when U.S. children reject bribery, and whether their rejections vary by public versus private setting. Six- to 10-year-olds (224 children, 118 boys, 106 girls, majority-White) participated across four experiments, in which participants indicated whether a contest judge should accept a contestant's financial gift. Children conveyed their preferences while in public or in private (in the presence or absence of an adult experimenter). Children's rejections of bribes were found to increase with age. Notably, younger children's acceptance rate was higher when the experimenter was present than in their absence; in contrast, older children showed comparable rejection rates across settings. Limitations in children's early reasoning about bribery, including the reputational and moral implications of accepting bribes in public, are discussed.

Early presence of a "power = males" association: Girls link power to their gender less often than boys but can be as motivated to gain it.

In three studies, it was tested whether children (N = 184; aged 6-10 years, White, mid- to high income) from a U.S. midwestern city used other individuals' gender and race to predict who is in charge and the means by which power is gained (Study 1) and whether children's own gender predicted their assignments of positions of authority (Study 2A) and pursuits of positions of authority (Study 2B). When asked to predict who was in charge at different workplaces, with age White children decreased their race-based, power-related favoritism; children were increasingly likely with age to link White adults to rather questionable routes to power as well as Black adults with meritorious reasons for gaining power (Study 1). In addition, boys (but not girls) systematically associated power with adult workers of their own gender and did so regardless of whether or not power had been obtained meritoriously (Study 1). Nonetheless, when given the option to assign an authority role (Study 2A) or assume an authority role (Study 2B), boys and girls exhibited comparable levels of in-group and self-biases.

The roles of group membership and social exclusion in children's testimonial learning.

Here, we used high- and low-stakes testimonial learning tasks to better understand two important types of social influence on children's learning decisions: group membership and social ostracism. Children (4- and 5-year-olds; N = 100) were either included or excluded by in-group or outgroup members in an online ball tossing game. Then, children were asked to selectively learn new information from either an in-group or out-group member. They also received counterintuitive information from an in-group or out-group member that was in conflict with their own intuitions. When learning new information, children who were excluded were more likely to selectively trust information from their in-group member. In contrast, when accepting counterintuitive information, children relied only on group membership regardless of their exclusion status. Together, these findings demonstrate ways in which different forms of testimonial learning are guided not only by epistemic motivations but also by social motivations of affiliation and maintaining relationships with others.

Evaluations of epistemic and practical reasons for belief in a predominantly White U.S. sample of preschoolers.

Parents and educators commonly seek to influence children's behavior by providing them with practical incentives, but how should we understand the influence of such incentives on children's beliefs? Are children capable of distinguishing between speech acts that provide practical reasons for believing, such as requests and offers, from speech acts that provide straightforward epistemic reasons, such as simple acts of telling? To investigate these questions, we randomly assigned 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 97) to one of two conditions (Request or Offer) in which two speakers each commented on a series of four exotic animals. In each condition, an agent who stated what an object was called with a simple telling ("This is a tanzer") was contrasted with an agent who made either a doxastic request ("I want you to think that this is a tanzer") or a doxastic offer ("If you think that this is a tanzer, I'll let you play with this new toy"). We then measured children's endorsement of and semantic memory for the claims as well as their knowledge attributions and resource allocation decisions. Our results suggest that children appreciate the epistemic reasons inherent in acts of telling when contrasted with doxastic requests, as evidenced by their general preference to learn from, attribute knowledge to, and share with the teller in the Request condition. When tellings were contrasted with doxastic offers, children were less systematic in their preferences. We discuss various interpretations of this finding and offer suggestions for future research.

Learning From "Thinkers": Parent Epistemological Understanding Predicts Individual Differences in Children's Judgments About Reasoners.

Four-, 5-, and 6-year olds (N = 102) observed agents perform a reasoning task that required gathering hidden evidence. An agent who made sound inferences was contrasted with an agent who made either unsound inferences (UI; failed to base conclusion on gathered evidence) or guesses (failed to gather evidence). Four-year olds attributed knowledge to all agents and endorsed their conclusions widely. However, 5- and 6-year olds' knowledge attributions were mitigated by UI, and 6-year olds neither attributed knowledge to a guesser nor endorsed his conclusions. Notably, parents' tendency to make evaluativist epistemological judgments-which place value in evidence as a basis for belief-predicted children's reluctance to learn from and credit knowledge to poor reasoners. Parents' evaluativist judgments also predicted children's selective learning about object functions.

The sense of obligation in children's testimonial learning.

We extend Tomasello's discussion of children's developing sense of obligation to testimonial learning. First, we review a battery of behaviors in testimonial exchanges that parallel those described by Tomasello. Second, we explore the variable ways in which children hold others accountable, suggestive that children's evaluations of moral and epistemic responsibilities in joint collaborative activities are distinct.

Cognitive Foundations of Learning from Testimony.

Humans acquire much of their knowledge from the testimony of other people. An understanding of the way that information can be conveyed via gesture and vocalization is present in infancy. Thus, infants seek information from well-informed interlocutors, supply information to the ignorant, and make sense of communicative acts that they observe from a third-party perspective. This basic understanding is refined in the course of development. As they age, children's reasoning about testimony increasingly reflects an ability not just to detect imperfect or inaccurate claims but also to assess what inferences may or may not be drawn about informants given their particular situation. Children also attend to the broader characteristics of particular informants-their group membership, personality characteristics, and agreement or disagreement with other potential informants. When presented with unexpected or counterintuitive testimony, children are prone to set aside their own prior convictions, but they may sometimes defer to informants for inherently social reasons.

Fourteen-month-olds selectively search for and use information depending on the familiarity of the informant in both laboratory and home contexts.

Infants are selective in their learning from others. However, there is only very limited research on the possible factors that shape this selectivity, especially when it comes to the impact of infants' familiarity with the informant and the context. The current study investigated whether 14-month-olds preferred to receive and use information provided by an unfamiliar informant (experimenter) compared with a familiar informant (parent) and whether this pattern depended on the context (home vs. laboratory). We tested infants either in the laboratory (n = 67) or in their home (n = 70). When both informants presented a novel object with positive or negative emotions, we measured infants' gaze behavior as an indicator for information search. When infants acted on the novel object themselves, we measured their exploratory behavior as an indicator of information use. Results revealed no effect of context on infants' information search and use. Rather, we found that the familiarity of informant had distinct effects on infant attention and object exploration. Namely, infants looked longer at the unfamiliar informant across contexts, but they explored more when the familiar informant presented the object compared with when the unfamiliar informant did so. Thus, during information search, 14-month-olds paid most attention to an unfamiliar source of information. However, participants explored the objects more when they came from a familiar source than when they came from an unfamiliar one. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed.

Conceptual constraints and mechanisms in children's selective learning.

Although we can support Heyes' call for more research on mechanisms, we disagree that the problem has been ignored as Heyes suggests. We also doubt that basic learning mechanisms are alone sufficient to account for the broad range of findings in the selective social learning literature. Although phylogenetically shared learning mechanisms must support selective social learning, we believe that they must also be guided by top-down conceptual considerations that may be special to humans. Research to date has been focused on establishing the boundary conditions on selective social learning, with the goal of making generalizations that will constrain theorizing about the character of that special knowledge. This is critical to our understanding of both why and how selective social learning manifests in children.

Children's strategic theory of mind.

Human strategic interaction requires reasoning about other people's behavior and mental states, combined with an understanding of their incentives. However, the ontogenic development of strategic reasoning is not well understood: At what age do we show a capacity for sophisticated play in social interactions? Several lines of inquiry suggest an important role for recursive thinking (RT) and theory of mind (ToM), but these capacities leave out the strategic element. We posit a strategic theory of mind (SToM) integrating ToM and RT with reasoning about incentives of all players. We investigated SToM in 3- to 9-y-old children and adults in two games that represent prevalent aspects of social interaction. Children anticipate deceptive and competitive moves from the other player and play both games in a strategically sophisticated manner by 7 y of age. One game has a pure strategy Nash equilibrium: In this game, children achieve equilibrium play by the age of 7 y on the first move. In the other game, with a single mixed-strategy equilibrium, children's behavior moved toward the equilibrium with experience. These two results also correspond to two ways in which children's behavior resembles adult behavior in the same games. In both games, children's behavior becomes more strategically sophisticated with age on the first move. Beyond the age of 7 y, children begin to think about strategic interaction not myopically, but in a farsighted way, possibly with a view to cooperating and capitalizing on mutual gains in long-run relationships.

Young Children Detect and Avoid Logically Inconsistent Sources: The Importance of Communicative Context and Executive Function.

The reported research tested the hypothesis that young children detect logical inconsistency in communicative contexts that support the evaluation of speakers' epistemic reliability. In two experiments (N = 194), 3- to 5-year-olds were presented with two speakers who expressed logically consistent or inconsistent claims. Three-year-olds failed to detect inconsistencies (Experiment 1), 4-year-olds detected inconsistencies when expressed by human speakers but not when read from books, and 5-year-olds detected inconsistencies in both contexts (Experiment 2). In both experiments, children demonstrated skepticism toward testimony from previously inconsistent sources. Executive function and working memory each predicted inconsistency detection. These findings indicate logical inconsistency understanding emerges in early childhood, is supported by social and domain general cognitive skills, and plays a role in adaptive learning from testimony.

The selective social learner as an agent of cultural group selection.

Developmental research characterizes even the youngest learners as critical and selective, capable of preserving or culling cultural information on the bases of informant accuracy, reasoning, or coherence. We suggest that Richerson et al. adjust their account of social learning in cultural group selection (CGS) by taking into consideration the role of the selective learner in the cultural inheritance system.

Reasoning about knowledge: Children's evaluations of generality and verifiability.

In a series of experiments, we examined 3- to 8-year-old children's (N=223) and adults' (N=32) use of two properties of testimony to estimate a speaker's knowledge: generality and verifiability. Participants were presented with a "Generic speaker" who made a series of 4 general claims about "pangolins" (a novel animal kind), and a "Specific speaker" who made a series of 4 specific claims about "this pangolin" as an individual. To investigate the role of verifiability, we systematically varied whether the claim referred to a perceptually-obvious feature visible in a picture (e.g., "has a pointy nose") or a non-evident feature that was not visible (e.g., "sleeps in a hollow tree"). Three main findings emerged: (1) young children showed a pronounced reliance on verifiability that decreased with age. Three-year-old children were especially prone to credit knowledge to speakers who made verifiable claims, whereas 7- to 8-year-olds and adults credited knowledge to generic speakers regardless of whether the claims were verifiable; (2) children's attributions of knowledge to generic speakers was not detectable until age 5, and only when those claims were also verifiable; (3) children often generalized speakers' knowledge outside of the pangolin domain, indicating a belief that a person's knowledge about pangolins likely extends to new facts. Findings indicate that young children may be inclined to doubt speakers who make claims they cannot verify themselves, as well as a developmentally increasing appreciation for speakers who make general claims.

Variations in teaching bring variations in learning.

A unified account of teaching such as Kline's can and should accommodate facts about teaching in nonhuman animals and culturally diverse populations. But to benefit from Kline's insights, we need to understand how her taxonomy of teaching maps onto a taxonomy of learning. The crux of the problem for scientists studying humans and nonhumans is to determine not only how different models teach, but how individuals select models, and how they learn differently from different models.

Heralding the authoritarian? Orientation toward authority in early childhood.

In the research reported here, we examined whether individual differences in authoritarianism have expressions in early childhood. We expected that young children would be more responsive to cues of deviance and status to the extent that their parents endorsed authoritarian values. Using a sample of 43 preschoolers and their parents, we found support for both expectations. Children of parents high in authoritarianism trusted adults who adhered to convention (vs. adults who did not) more than did children of parents low in authoritarianism. Furthermore, compared with children of parents low in authoritarianism, children of parents high in authoritarianism gave greater weight to a status-based "adult = reliable" heuristic in trusting an ambiguously conventional adult. Findings were consistent using two different measures of parents' authoritarian values. These findings demonstrate that children's trust-related behaviors vary reliably with their parents' orientations toward authority and convention, and suggest that individual differences in authoritarianism express themselves well before early adulthood.

Reducing an in-group bias in preschool children: the impact of moral behavior.

How impressionable are in-group biases in early childhood? Previous research shows that young children display robust preferences for members of their own social group, but also condemn those who harm others. The current study investigates children's evaluations of agents when their group membership and moral behavior conflict. After being assigned to a minimal group, 4- to 5-year-old children either saw their in-group member behave antisocially, an out-group member act prosocially, or control agents, for whom moral information was removed. Children's explicit preference for and willingness to share with their in-group member was significantly attenuated in the presence of an antisocial in-group member, but not a prosocial out-group member. Interestingly, children's learning decisions were unmoved by a person's moral behavior, instead being consistently guided by group membership. This demonstrates that children's in-group bias is remarkably flexible: while moral information curbs children's in-group bias on social evaluations, social learning is still driven by group information.

Does governmental corruption aid or hamper early moral development? Insights from the Dominican Republic and United States contexts.

We tested whether children growing up in the Dominican Republic (D.R.), a context with relatively high governmental corruption levels, would support versus distance themselves from widespread unethical practices like bribery. In Experiment 1 (moral judgments; n = 106), D.R. elementary schoolers and adults evaluated judges who accepted gifts from contestants before or after selecting contest winners and predicted whether bribe-taking judges would be secretive. Like adults, older-but not younger-D.R. elementary schoolers differentially condemned judges who accepted gifts before versus after picking contest winners. Unlike adults, children often predicted that judges would disclose receiving gifts. In Experiment 2 (moral behaviors; n = 44), D.R. elementary schoolers could secretly accept or reject a bribe in exchange for 1st place while judging a drawing contest. All but two children rejected the bribe. Together, these findings stand in contrast with U.S. bribery-related developmental trends (Reyes-Jaquez & Koenig, 2021, 2022) and support this contention: When growing up in a more morally heterogeneous context like the D.R., children eventually assume a critical and differentiated stance toward-and will resist or subvert-some of their culture's unethical practices. Greater exposure to a wide range of unethical transactions might hinder aspects of bribery-related moral development early on, depending on how these aspects are measured (moral judgment vs. behavior). Nevertheless, over time, such exposure may strengthen children's capacity to resist unethical cultural practices, indicated by children's overwhelming rejection of bribes. We discuss the importance of including diverse response modalities (verbal, behavioral) when measuring psychological constructs in non-Western societies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Trusting information from friends: Adults expect it but preschoolers do not.

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 privilege friendship over reliability? Across three experiments, we explored whether friendship influences the evaluations of trust when others learn labels for novel objects as well as personal opinions. After watching scenes involving a main character, her best friend, and a stranger, preschoolers and adults judged who would be trusted for information from the main character's perspective (third person) as well as their own (first person). Adults (n = 128, 55 female, recruited online from across the United States) expected the main character to trust information from her friend even if she had been previously inaccurate, while basing their own first-person judgments on accuracy. In contrast, 4- and 5-year-olds (n = 128, 62 female, from the United States) thought that the main character would be like themselves and prioritize accuracy over friendship. Further, preschoolers expected the main character to trust her (inaccurate) friend and (accurate) stranger equally when forming personal opinions. Thus, young children, unlike adults, do not expect others' epistemic trust to privilege friendship with the speaker over accuracy information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The Collaborative Nature of Testimonial Learning.

Children's testimonial learning often occurs in epistemic collaborations with others. In this paper, we will discuss ways in which cultural learning emerges in social and interpersonal contexts, and is intrinsically supported and guided by children's collaborative capacities. Much work in cultural learning has focused on children's examination of speaker and model characteristics, but more recent research has investigated the interactive aspects of testimonial exchanges. We will review evidence that children (1) participate in the interpersonal commitments that are shared in testimonial transactions by way of direct address and epistemic buck passing, (2) participate in social groups that affect their selective learning in nuanced ways, and (3) may detect epistemic harms by listeners who refuse to believe sincere and accurate speakers. Implications for conceptualizing children's testimonial learning as an interactive mechanism of collaboration will be discussed.