Children selectively endorse speculative conjectures.

ABSTRACT

Young children are epistemically vigilant, attending to the reliability, expertise, and confidence of their informants and the prior probability and verifiability of their claims. But the pre-eminent requirement of any hypothesis is that it provides a potential solution to the question at hand. Given questions with no known answer, the ability to selectively adopt new, unverified, speculative proposals may be critical to learning. This study explores when people might reasonably reject known facts in favor of unverified conjectures. Across four experiments, when conjectures answer questions that available facts do not, both adults (n = 48) and children (4.0-7.9 years, n = 241, of diverse race and ethnicity) prefer the conjectures, even when the conjectures are preceded by uncertainty markers or explicitly violate prior expectations.